Luke Hohmann’s Blog

I was visiting a client of Enthiosys to discuss Agile Software Development practices and during the meeting my client mentioned that her company had recently created a New Product Development / Ideation group.  I looked at the wall and noticed an ideation process map and asked if that map was how this group intended to work. She replied yes, that that process map was the current thinking from this group. She detailed the process, which showed several sources of input into the New Product Development group. Among the sources listed included:

• Corporate strategy
• Corporate capabilities
• Competitive assessment
• Analyst research
• New technology
• Core competencies

There were a few more, but I honestly can’t remember what they were because what was missing just hit me like a 2×4 in the chest. Customer. The actual customers of this client were never listed on this chart. Not once. Not in qualitative research. Not in quantitative research. Simply not listed.

When I asked my client about this, she replied something like “Well, this may not be the final version of their process. I think they are planning on talking to customers, but I’m not sure. Customer support is listed as an input into the diagram — that should help, right?”

I told her that yes, soliciting input for New Product Concepts from internal groups such as sales, professional services, and customer support was helpful, but I also told her that I thought it was an egregious mistake to create a New Product Development / Ideation group that doesn’t talk directly with customers.

In the hopes of stating what should be blatlantly obvious, the foundation of innovation is understanding your customers. This includes talking with them.

A few days ago I received an email from a friend announcing his new job as CTO of a startup company . Except the email didn’t come from my friend. It came from LinkedIn, via a feature that allows LinkedIn users to announce new jobs. Very cool, and very useful. I thought that sending an email announcing the availability of my new book on Innovation Games to my (admittedly small) LinkedIn network would be of interest to my network. So I logged into LinkedIn looking for a way to do this. In the process, I found a great example of how using existing features in unintended ways can both spur creative thinking and run afoul of license agreements. The result provides a lot of food for thought. Perhaps more importantly, the professional manner in which the LinkedIn team handled the situation provides a great example of how to manage potentially volatile situations.

The Goal: Sending a Message to My LinkedIn Network

The first thing I tried was the “Send message:” list of options from the home page (see below). Yeah, I know – this was the completely obvious choice, but let’s give credit to the LinkedIn making it the completely obvious choice.

I must admit that when I first looked at this list I was disappointed, because I didn’t see an obvious way to send an email to my network. Since I’m a freeloader at LinkedIn (aka, “Personal Account”), I started to think that perhaps this was an option reserved for paying customers. This is fair enough, and is certainly a feature that a user might be willing to pay for.

My mind started to wander. I really wanted to send an email to my network, but I imagined that LinkedIn would probably want me to sign up for a monthly fee for something that I wanted to do just once. Time to do a little research. As it turns out, LinkedIn does offer this feature in their various subscription oriented account plans (“Business”, “Business plus”, and “Pro”). The problem is that I don’t write books every month, and I don’t have a lot of reasons to blast emails to my LinkedIn network. As a result, signing up for a monthly fee for a service I’ll use once infrequently didn’t seem like a good choice.

Ideally, what I’d like LinkedIn to provide is a transactional business model for distributing emails (more information on business models can be found in my book Beyond Software Architecture, which I should probably discuss in a future post).

Creative Thinking About a Feature

Back to the drawing board.

My friend had used LinkedIn to send a job notification. This capability appeared to exist for free. What if I were to treat my announcement on the Innovation Games book like a job notification? Innovation Games are, after all, a job that myself and other Innovation Game Certified Facilitators love to do. So what if instead of announcing my book, I was really making an announcement of a new job – Innovation Games.

I selected the menu item “Send job notification” and filled out a form capturing all of the relevant details. It was, again, quite easy to use. I clicked “Send” and voila! A message sent to my LinkedIn network.

The first reply to this email came from Scott Gilbert, President of Enthiosys, who noted that I was misusing a feature. Creatively misusing a feature, but, misusing a feature. He was right, of course, but I thought it was a fun way to get the word out about the book to a network that I thought would want to hear about the same. I didn’t even stop to think that I might have been violating a license agreement. I should have.

SPAM: It is all a Matter of Perception

A few days later I found the following message in my email inbox:

Dear Luke,
We have received complaints that you have used LinkedIn’s job forwarding feature to promote your new book and ask your connections to send the promotion to your connections. Your book looks genuinely interesting. However, I’m sure you’re aware that this is a really blatant misuse of LinkedIn. What you may not understand is how much this actually hurts everyone on LinkedIn by spreading the idea that LinkedIn is a source of spam. That encourages other aggressive marketers to try to imitate this type of misuse of LInkedIn, and it encourages people who end up getting unwelcome spam through LinkedIn to avoid using LinkedIn.
Please read our User Agreement, especially the User Conduct section and let me know if you understand and agree to follow our policies. Until we hear from you we’ve restricted your ability to send messages of any kind through LinkedIn.
Nothing personal here. I hope you understand that we’re trying to keep LinkedIn useful, safe, and non-annoying for everyone.
All the best, and good luck with your book.
Duncan Work
LinkedIn Privacy Officer

I immediately replied with an apology, and Duncan removed the restriction from my account.

It is worthy to examine Duncan’s email in greater detail. It is a superbly professional way of telling me that I had violated my User Agreement. Duncan’s tone is straightforward. It doesn’t make me feel like an idiot or cheater, and it clearly explains why this policy is important to me and everyone using LinkedIn. It opens the door to future conversations, and outlines how to remove my account restrictions.

More importantly, I feel that a person read this email and acted on the situation in a way that was guided by corporate policies and yet tailored to this specific situation. I suspect, but cannot prove, that if I was a known spammer, or if this email was part of a consistent pattern of abuse, that this response would have been markedly different. The unintended effect is that I have an even more positive image of LinkedIn – there are real people there!

I’d like to point out that I’ve tried to manage my LinkedIn network pretty carefully and was therefore genuinely surprised that any member of my network would not be extremely happy to receive this email. Most know I’ve been working on the Innovation Games book for several years, and Innovation Games help you better understand your customers. That said, I must concede that it meets the definition of Spam, and whomever reported to the LinkedIn team certainly had every right to do this.

I’ve learned since then that people are forwarding the message to their LinkedIn network, possibly using the same approach. While I’m happy that the book is being promoted, I certainly don’t want to promote the misuse of LinkedIn features or the proliferation of Spam.

Creative Thinking About a Feature

Recall that this post was motivated by thinking of the Innovation Games book announcement as a new job that I was announcing to my LinkedIn network. More generally, it has me thinking about the power that unintended features have to spur creative thinking and how product teams can capitalize on the same. Right now, I’m wondering what would happen if I were to anthropomorphize Innovation Games and think of them as a person looking for work. What would their resume say? It would probably describe the games, list relevant experience, explain what they’re great at (improving customer understanding) — all of the “normal” things that you put into a resume. Someone reading this resume would then know if they want to “hire” the games to help them better understand their customers. (Hmmm. More creative thinking. That sounds like a data sheet. Maybe resumes are a better format for describing products than data sheets).

What would happen should I post this resume a major job web site? Would I run the risk of unintentionally violating another license agreement? Possibly. And since ignorance of the law is no excuse, I’d be more sensitive to using such resume posting features properly (or at least be more aware of intentionally breaking them ;-).

I am also thinking about how patterns of misuse can be captured and used to promote your products and services. Enthiosys has one client that offers a SaaS solution that has honed their analysis of user behavior to the point where they can identify patterns of misuse in their product and proactively recommend consulting services to resolve problems experienced by the company. These are weighted by the amount of revenue provided by the customer, so that intervention can occur quickly where it makes the most sense. In this example of using LinkedIn, I would have been pleased had Duncan included either of the following in his email:

1. a link to other service plans that might allow me to accomplish the email goal, or,
2. a clear statement that there is simply no way to send out this kind of email via LinkedIn.

As I described earlier, another option would be for LinkedIn to offer some of their features via a transactional business model. They’d have to explore this idea very carefully, because I suspect that their financial plans are based on subscribers per month, not individual transactions. As with any business model choice, the trick is matching the value provided to the way that you charge for that value. Keep Media, another Enthiosys client, has found a way to offer both transactional and subscription choices to their core service model with interesting results.

Managing Features For Fun and Profit

One way to think about what product managers do is that they manage features for fun and profit. People like me will use them ways that range from conventional to novel, and in ways that may or may not be compliant with existing license agreements. How do you respond to your users when they creatively use your features? How do you respond when creative use of a feature crosses over the line and becomes a violation of a license agreement? Do either they feed your product innovation engine? If so, how?

My new book Innovation Games hits store shelves on Sept 1st. Needless to say, I’m pretty excited about the publication of the book and encouraged by ongoing debates about the source of invention, innovation, and how these are harnessed to create great products. 

Let’s start with two recent posts about Innovation. David Pollard, in his Fast Company post, argues that innovation starts with a deep understanding of user needs. David claims that one of the motivations for his post is to respond to a post from Kathy Sierra, in which she asserts that we can’t leave innovation up to users, citing the creation of great art (Beethoven’s 5th) and the development of the iPod as examples of things that customers didn’t ask for, but now, can’t live without. 

Except that David uses the iPod in his post as the example of customer-driven, evolutionary innovation that produces breakthroughs. Hmmmmm. 

Both of these people, whom I respect quite a bit, are using the same example to promote their thesis. Summarizing, David appears to be in the camp that innovation comes from a deep understanding of customer needs, while Kathy appears to the in the camp that innovation comes from within, not necessarily in response to user needs, and that you certainly cannot outsource innovation to users. 

I’m in David’s camp on this one. The whole reason I spent almost three years writing Innovation Games is to help provide everyone with better ways to understand user needs. Moreover, I’ve participated in too many sessions with customers in which they outlined innovative solutions to their problems using such games like Prune the Product Tree and Remember the Future. 

But I’m not quite willing to throw out Kathy’s ideas. To understand the discussion we need to tease apart some of the concepts. Kathy seems to be equating art with innovation and creativity. David, in turn, tackles invention and innovation. These aren’t the same things. 

Let’s start with the distinction between invention and innovation. Joan Waltman, President of QUALCOMM Wireless Business Solutions, who wrote the foreword to my latest book describes the difference as follows: 

QUALCOMM is a company renowned for both creating new science and technology (invention) and applying it to solve customer problems (innovation). 

Exploring this distinction a bit more closely, and adding your experience to the exploration, it is easy to see that both invention and innovation are new. Both involve creativity. Both may or may not produce commercially viable or successful results. The difference is the focus of the activity. Invention is focused on creating technology that maybe in the future will have a useful way application (think: creating the transistor). Innovation is focused on solving a user problem (think: creating Google). My experience is that most invention, such as the inventions that power the internal workings of Google’s massive network of computers, is actually driven by innovation, leading you down the path from David’s post to Innovation Games and other similar techniques. 

So where does Kathy’s notion of art come into play in innovation and invention? Sometimes, it doesn’t. “Art” doesn’t have to be associated with anything, especially when the focus is solving the deep and personal human needs for enjoyment, creative expression, or just plain fun. I’ve experienced this a bit myself, when I was a competitive figure skater. Sometimes you just did tricks for fun, accidentally inventing new tricks in the process. It didn’t mean anything, unless you really wanted it to.

But there is another kind of art that is associated with invention and creativity. Rob Austin and Lee Devin discuss kind of art in their seminal work, Artful Marking. Among other things, they discuss the power of collaborative play and emergent, shared knowledge that is associated with creating new things (typically innovations). This is a special, powerful kind of compelling art. One that both Kathy and David agree with, in that in both of their posts they acknowledge the role that you play in creating innovations. Kathy emphasizes that you need to take an active role in this process. David emphasizes that this role needs to start by understanding user needs.

On Wed Feb 15th I moderated a panel for the NorCal chapter of the PDMA. The topic was the “Fuzzy Front End” of Product Development. Panelists included (panelist bios can be found here):

• Michael Osofsky - Chief Innovation Officer, Accelovation (blog here)
• Sundar Raghavan - VP of Solutions Marketing, Ariba
• Daniel Greenberg - President, CMOPro
• Todd Hay - Platform Marketing, Adobe

As moderator, it was difficult to take notes, but I did manage to jot some memorable comments from the panelists. We started by asking an opening question to each panelist. I was both pleased and impressed with the candor and efficiency by which the panelists answered these questions.

I started by asking Michael to clarify some of his work and experience with the “science” of innovation. More pointedly, I wanted to know if innovation could be a science? Michael responded that it isn’t that we should try to make innovation scientific, but rather, the community could benefit and innovation could be improved if we scientifically study successful approaches and methods. Michael then referenced various kinds of research being done, from Abbie Griffin’s research on personality characteristics of innovators to other studies that assess the larger socio-political factors that influence innovation (similar to the themes explored by Thomas L. Friedman in The World is Flat).

Sundar’s position on the panel provided an interesting opportunity to assess the kinds of responses that organizations can take when trying to create “whole product” solutions for customers, as Sundar has been intimately involved in the choices that Ariba has made to either build new product platforms and/or acquire companies. He pointed out that at times Ariba has asked its development organization to expand the application footprint through internal development while at others Ariba has elected to acquire a complimentary organization. The most notable example of this was the acquisition of FreeMarkets, which was part of an intentional strategic choice to provide a comprehensive suite of service offerings to an existing customer base. The innovation, here, is the idea that not all innovations are pure product plays. Here at Enthiosys we feel pretty strongly that this approach must be a core element of the strategy of any product company, and we provide services in these areas.

This theme was echoed by the comments and experiences of Daniel, who provided insight into how Macrovision’s growth was aided by a large number of marketing, service, sales, and operations innovations. Daniel also provided us with a description of some of the ideation processes that were used to create these non-product innovations, and I was struck by how these techniques paralleled similar techniques used by product companies.

As a founder of OASIS, Todd Hay has been a leading thinker and proponent of standards for many years. Standards and innovations have many interesting relationships, and I wanted to better understand if Todd thought that standards fostered or hindered innovations. Todd’s discussion covered a lot of ground, and I hope I do it justice. One thing that Todd noted was that standard tend to make it clear what aspects of a solution have been commoditized and therefore drive a company to truly understand how they provide a unique value proposition in the market. He made a compelling argument that standards drive — not stifle — innovation. Strategically, he suggested that product managers carefully consider how standards may form the foundation of their business (e.g., standards associated with the form and function of RFID tags enable innovation in RFID readers).

Following these opening remarks the audience engaged in several questions related to both the opening remarks and the thematic topic of the evening. A few items that of interest, at least to me, included:

• Sundar, describing that Ariba has “product” managers for services, and Daniel, noting that answering this question for your company depends on the core strategy of your company: do you want to sell products or servces?
• Michael suggesting that we explore the practical and strategic value of user toolkits promoted by such noted researches as Stefan Thomke and Eric von Hippel.
• Daniel, in a response to a question from the audience, noting that product managers must take time out of their schedules to drive innovation. Daniel suggested correlating the time needed to reflect and think about innovation with your annual planning cycles, which resonated with many in the audience.
• Daniel, describing that to really get to a meaningful point in brainstorming, you need to generate 60-70 ideas, so that people have to really “stretch” to get to the next set of ideas.
• Todd, describing that Adobe’s future strategies will have a greater aspects of services, including a formal Professional Services Organization (PSO), an XD (eXtreme Design) team, and giving Microsoft props about Microsoft’s sales and channel innovations.
• Sundar, describing some of the challenges that product companies have in adopting Agile software development practices. Our experiences here at Enthiosys support this thesis, and while we are strong proponents of Agile methods, we also believe that product companies need to adapt Agile approaches to the genuine differences that exist in product vs IT software development.
• Todd, with a classic quote: “There is no channel conflict in Enterprise Software” (I agree, a lesson I learned from Avi Barir, my old boss at Aladdin Knowledge Systems, Inc.).
• Todd, with another great quote about services: “Broader mindshare leads to broader pocket share”.

The last question of the evening was what books the panelists would recommend.

• Michael: Einstein in the Boardroom
• Sundar: Blue Ocean Strategy
• Daniel: The Four Steps to the Epiphany
• Todd: The Goal
• Luke: Understanding Comics

I’ve enjoyed all of these books and can recommend them all. �

It was a fun event, and I thank the panelists for sharing their time and wisdom so generously.

Luke

One of recent business books that has gotten a lot of press is Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne. The favorable press is well-deserved, and in looking over my copy of the book I see many, many dog-eared pages. I know that I’ll be referencing it quite a bit.

The most important aspect of the book is the focus on value innovation. Kim and Mauborgne recommend that to create value innovations you have to focus on the user. This phrase, or variants thereof, are all over the book. Indeed, they devote a signficant portion of Chapter 8 encouraging executives to directly interact with users.

This is a perfect opportunity for Innovation Games. Using Innovation Games, you can get close your customers, understanding their needs on their terms. This is the cornerstone of value innovation.