Inspire a Culture of Innovation
I was recently asked what does it mean to be innovative? Now, this is a very broad question and can lead to many meandering thoughts so to add some guardrails, I will be speaking mainly in the realm of a product organization. Many of these themes can be transferrable across a number of industries.
Innovation is a process — an organization has to execute well on the fundamentals and be disciplined to build trust in these practices. Here are some themes that come to mind.
1. Understand
At a foundational level, innovation cannot happen if we don’t understand our customers and industry. Ultimately, your target audience work from a suite of products with a diverse set of backgrounds and we should understand their motivations and what they do to achieve them — within that, we can understand what works, what doesn’t, and where there’s an opportunity.
This is why building empathy is so important. Without this level of understanding, projects may turn out into long and dragged out process that can run the potential of not delivering value.
At a foundational level, here is a list of simple practices that don’t require a lot of overhead that you can execute on tomorrow.
- Contextual Inquiries allow you to interview and observe your customers. These are great for organizations that may not have a dedicated research team.
- Use our own product — If applicable try to run real-world scenarios in your own product. When you put the hat on of a user, you will catch things you didn’t before.
- Work through support tickets or get in the trenches with your support team. Troubleshooting tickets with your customers can be eye-opening, you may uncover dead-ends in your product, lack of clarity in copy, and maybe that experience you shipped was so simple after all.
2. Encourage New Ideas and constructive feedback
Create an environment that is not only inclusive but empowers all members of your organization to contribute.
- Design Sprints can help align a number of partners identify and focus on opportunities quickly.
- Team retrospectives when a project or quarter comes to an end, have a discussion with your team around what worked, opportunities to improve, new ideas, or simply give thanks.
- Product principles build a culture of feedback and constructive problem-solving. Most importantly they help teams constructively say “no” more than “yes” that can scale from an individual designer to developers, marketers, product managers.
3. Implementation
Move faster — How can we reduce the time to push/increase iteration through testing?
- Prioritize work on design systems. This can not only centralize visual bugs, but it unlocks the potential to build out MVP experiences quicker and validate with real data input.
- Validate concepts with usability testing. No one wants to spend hours developing a product that doesn’t work. It costs much less to iterate on designs than a product that is already built.
4. Optimize through experimentation
Optimization tracks become more than just growth hacking but a sustainable approach of diverging and converging on ideas unique to your product and members. Small steps can make a big impact over time.
- Identify Critical paths track tasks by experience this will help you and identify drop-off and churn. User flows can help identify these pathways if you don’t know where to start.
- A/B Testing experiences can be used to test assumptions, try new concepts, or optimize on what’s existing.
5. Time
Most importantly time has to be set aside to help make this a reality. Here are a few ways to start
- Set aside time every quarter to work on future-facing concepts
- Budget design and research to work on non-engineering funded projects — this reduces the pressure to time box deliverables. Additionally, the cost of doing revisions on design is far less than building it in code!
Closing
You likely have individuals or teams in your organization that are well-versed in one or more many of these practices. Try to leverage them if possible, or dive into some of the above concepts.
What are some ways you try to encourage innovation in your product organization?
