It's one thing to find a nice feature idea, or even an entire compelling customer experience, once or twice. It's another thing to create an environment where compelling customer experiences are continuously surfaced, evaluated, developed, and tested.
So how do you find product leaders capable of creating that environment? History is good, but only if outcomes are coupled with the processes
that produced them, or the context is fully understood. Fortunate market
circumstances, individual luck, failure on the part of competitors, or the
opposite of all of those things, can lead to false positives and negatives.
And frankly, even for most of its practitioners, product ideation remains a black art - which is why so many poeple claim to be product managers. This is changing. Product management is developing its own patterns and practices of product and feature ideation. At the fringes, we're turning the black art into a science with increasing predictive capability and explanatory power.
Much of my work today stems from the application in product management ideation of the deep structures that have been explored, and are widely accepted, in other more established fields. Their use in product management may be novel, but then what is creativity if not making productive connections between things not previously connected?
Examples:
- Spacial relationship patterns as documented in the architectural pattern work of Christopher Alexander;
- Social/cultural and individual behavior patterns;
- "Deep Metaphors";
- The relationships between evolutionary theory (or more recently "anti-fragility) and product roadmap development;
- Creativity and idea evaluation patterns and the "Six Hats";
- Cognitive psychology as a basis for gamification planning;
- And, simple modeling generally, though specifically in the application of "platform" concepts to optimize "optimization".
Though appearing later, this is really the bigger brother of what's traditionally called customer focus. These patterns, properly applied, offer a lens to better predict, interpret, and act on observed customer behaviors. Said otherwise, they don't replace talking to customers, or polling customers, or A/B testing, or any new form of useability, or whatever communication model you're employing. They do shape input and thereby promise to streamline the process - to reduce the garbage in "garbage in garbage out". And they do signal an eventual end to the wild west of product management ideation.
learned to crawl with simple utility-based broadcast solutions. Then it learned to talk, and we called that "social" or web 2.0 (or first grade). Next we're going to create simple multi-channel experiences that integrate with our lives.
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