I personally believe our world, especially with so many feature rich products, is getting more complex every day. So, when I hear about simplifying products by removing features, I certainly applaud the action. However, there is a right way and a wrong way of managing features, especially when these features are already been introduced to the field and are in use by your customers.

Today, Netflix announced a removal of a key feature (at least it is key to me): multiple profiles per account. This valuable feature allows us to maintain several queues, one for each member of our household. For whatever the reason, Netflix has decided to remove this feature, and their FAQ is below. Note that Netflix is not providing any explanation, or an alternative to allow for an easy transition.

Jeff Lash of How To Be A Good Product Manager has a well written article on how to address feature removal from your product: Do not be afraid to remove features. Looking at Twitter traffic on this topic, Netflix product manager should be reading Jeff’s blog and revisiting this decision.

Should features be removed, and products be simplified? Absolutely! However, before one goes crazy over removing existing features, there needs to be a cost/benefit analysis and a good plan to handle the migration issues.

We will be eliminating Profiles, the feature that allowed you to set up separate DVD Queues under one account.
When? Profiles will be eliminated on September 1, 2008.
Why? While it may be disappointing to see this feature go away, this change will help us to continue to improve the Netflix website for all our customers.
Do I need to do anything? Consider moving all DVD titles in your Profiles Queues to your main account Queue. To do so, log-in and visit this page
How will this impact my account? On September 1, 2008:

• All DVDs currently at home or in transit will be associated with the main account Queue
• All Profiles rental history will be added into the main account rental history
• Your additional Profile Queues will be eliminated. If you would like to keep a copy of each
• Profile Queue we recommend that you print them out
• Prior to Profiles going away, we will also email you a copy of your Profile Queues
• Profiles movie ratings and Profiles Friends connections will no longer be available
• You will not be able to transfer your Profiles data to a separate new account
• You will be able to set a maturity filter on the main account

Technorati Tags: netflix, product management

I stumbled upon IBM’s innovation stories from around the globe. Each story is insightful, interesting and some are also inspiring. They are all about applying technology to a real-world problem.

My favorite is the story of Teatro La Fenice and access to their performances on the Digital Sipario archives. I even love the name: Digital Sipario = Digital Curtain. As you enjoy the performances, please reflect: What is your innovation story?

Technorati Tags: IBM

Our bird feeder has been getting quite an interest recently. However, I must admit, I wasn’t thinking about feeding Steller’s Jay when I picked the bird feeder or the food.

Are your customers bending over backwards to use your product? Do they get the value they expect?

How about your support crew? How are they handling the mess of the situation?

Technorati Tags: target customer

“The only winning move is not to play” is what WOPR concluded after playing endless drawn games of tic-tac-toe against itself in the movie WarGames. By recognizing the simple cause and effect relationship and learning that sometimes there are no winners, WOPR demonstrated its system thinking, its big picture thinking thereby saving the world.

While the traditional form of analysis focuses on taking apart the individual pieces of the whole to be studied, systems thinking focuses on the whole itself: interactions and interdependencies that takes place between what is being studied and the system it is part of. By expanding the view of the system, more interactions and interdependencies can be identified and analyzed. This expanded view could result in a different conclusion than anticipated through traditional forms of analysis, especially when the system is complex with numerous interactions, internal or external.

Perhaps the importance of systems thinking is best seen in nature. There are numerous case studies of introducing non-native species to new regions for one purpose or another. The Cane toad was introduced to Australia to control sugar cane pests, but instead are now declared as an invasive species in Australia, and are a serious threat to native biodiversity. Along the same lines, Scotch Broom was brought to Pacific Northwest to be used as a garden ornamental. Unfortunately, this bush has bloomed out of control and is now considered an invasive specie in Washington and other states.

Just like the environment, your firm is a complex organism and a living system. As with any system, you need to understand and manage the internal and external interactions and interdependencies to be successful. As I mentioned before in Innovation Process: 3 Things You Can Count On, innovation is an effect in economy and society. To avoid being referred to as an invasive species, you need to incorporate systems thinking, big picture perspective, into your innovation process. How you internally manage your innovation process, how you handle the interactions and interdependencies between your idea generation, strategic planning, resource allocation, competency development and more is just as important for your success. By managing your innovation as a system, internally and externally, you increase the chances of your success.

Below are some tools to help you sharpen your systems thinking. I would love to hear about your tools, and what works for you and your team.

• Apply the 5 Whys: As painful as it is at times, I do enjoy the Why? questions that my son asks. Asking Why? helps one to move from the immediate symptom to cover the underlying problem, and thereby identify potential resolutions to the issue at hand. Just make sure in the process, you are focusing on facts and not opinions, as your goal is to identify potential actions that you can take. Opinions, finger pointing and such are just explanations that do not lend themselves to solutions. If you do happen to get an explanation, ask again Why else could it be? Each Why? question will take you to a different perspective, different context and expand your system further, opening up new possibilities and potentials.
• Use scenario planning and stories: Write stories about the potential futures of your innovation. Then use these stories to capture relationships, interactions and interdependencies between various parts to build the view of the whole system. As you build your story, focus on the type of relationships: supportive, limiting, negative, unintended consequences, … Each of these could then feed into your risk management process, your assumption validation and other parts of your innovation management cycle as appropriate.
• Leverage the power of diversity: In order to uncover hidden relationships and capture the impact of interdependencies you need a diverse team of experts, skills, experiences and perspectives, i.e. a cross-functional team. Bear in mind that as your scenarios and stories expand, so should your team, including potentially suppliers, partners, customers, analysts, … Be flexible with your team structure and be open to signs when you need to reevaluate its membership.
• Stimulate your creativity: I enjoy shuffling through Roger von Oech’s Innovative Whack Pack. Regardless of which card I pick, it offers a new insight and wisdom that I need to incorporate into my thinking.
• Compile a portfolio of analysis tools: Porter’s 5 Forces,life cycle analysis tools, cause-and-effect diagrams, TRIZ, value chain analysis and others can help bring a systems perspective to your thinking.
• Improve your collaboration and change management skills: Systems thinking is about interactions and interdependencies, and how things behave within the whole, internally and externally. It is about recognizing these interactions and changing or managing them accordingly. So, sharpen your collaboration and change management skills to improve your overall effectiveness.

Finally, establish regular checkpoints. As I mentioned before, we are all part of a complex organism and a living system. As you launch your innovation, you will need to continuously monitor and examine the system and analyze if its behaving as expected. If the results are not what you anticipated, then review and adjust. In a way, it is all an experiment.

Technorati Tags: systems thinking, big picture thinking

The McKinsey Quarterly recently published their survey results on “Why multinationals struggle to manage talent“. Their result highlights the challenges that multinational firms are facing when it comes to managing global talent, and more importantly, how it can reflect on their financial results.

International assignments enable firms to achieve greater cultural diversity, innovation through better understanding of their target customers, enabling knowledge transfer between divisions as well as further development of company talent. Yet, many employees don’t view overseas experience as valuable career path, mostly due to the way companies handle international assignments. Based on their survey, McKinsey indicates that those who have done well in managing their global talent have the following best practices:

• Top management encourages people to get experience in multiple business units/locations across organizations
• Overseas experience is regarded as a prerequisite to promotion to senior level within organizations
• Managers are willing to or are offered incentives to lose their talented employees to other divisions, functions or geographies within the company

Along these lines, also check out Kai-Fu Lee’s (President of Google Greater China) Carnegie Mellon presentation “Google China — Can a Multinational Internet Company Succeed in China?” on YouTube. He discusses Google’s success in China and highlights key factors to their continued performance. During the presentation, you will also gain great insights into challenges awaiting companies entering China.

I realize that times have changed… However, I did not internalized the amount of change until my neighbor’s 14-year-old said “I love everything wheat!” And it is not just her; my 10-year-old prefers whole wheat over Wonder Bread. I might be living in a community where there is more sensitivity towards environmental, social and health consciousness. However, I bet there are more communities around the world such as ours. And, those are not the only trends that are shifting. You are probably wondering, what does this have to do with innovation or technology management? Let’s break these trends down; jump in with your own observations and insights.

Going green and ethical consciousness

These days, it seems like every other ad in a magazine is about a firm’s greenness and their new environmentally friendly products or processes. Though the ads might be a fad, the growth of environmental and social consciousness is certainly not. Our new generation is observing the negative impact we have had on our environment, on earth’s natural resources and overall society first hand. That consciousness and society’s learnings are here to stay.

My son recently shared his view on space travel: “We have to find a new planet to colonize, as the human race will be extinct given what we have done to the environment.” I hope it is not as black and white as he sees it.

Let’s not forget ethical consciousness. The Internet, always-connected technologies and social networks have significantly increased the degree of transparency firms once had. With that, consumers are more knowledgeable and demand more from your firm. MIT Sloan Management Review recently published a study on Does Being Ethical Pay? (may require subscription.) The study shows that consumers are willing to pay a slight premium for ethically made goods, and would buy unethically made products only at a steep discounts. The Women of The Buyer’s Army is taking activism to the next level as highlighted in the Ode Magazine. Their mission is to raise shoppers’ awareness on how various products are made.

Your mission, if you decide to accept it, is to incorporate green technologies, environmental and ethical consciousness into your organization’s DNA. Right now your customers are demanding it, and tomorrow your workforce will be joining them too.

Talent management

I can’t help but share my observation on the hypocrisy of some of the CEOs out there, in this case Mark Hurd… Anyone that is plugged into the US business news is aware of CEOs’ concerns on dwindling US tech talent. Though I haven’t seen a study, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a cause-effect relationship between early US outsourcing trends to current US graduates in the technology field. However, the part that really bothers me is when a CEO complains about dwindling US tech talent on one breath, and then reduce his US workforce in large numbers in another breath.

So, let’s focus on the real issue at hand. It is NOT that the US doesn’t have talent, it is either not the right talent or not at the right price. Given that, along with accelerated technology shifts and US visa procedures, your talent management strategy has become even more relevant.

In search for a meaning

Maybe the generations are in crisis, or finally we are learning there is more to life than just work. Either way, as average life expectancy increases, so does the need for that life to be more meaningful and purposeful at every aspect of our lives. I should know, as I am one in search of meaning.

As a manager, you might already be experiencing these shifts in your workforce. Changes that have been taking place just from the perspective of technology alone have been amazing, mainly driven by kids that never experienced a world without the Internet, have no clue what a floppy drive looks like or why would anyone want to use such a thing in the first place Where the communication is driven by text messaging, instant messaging, emails and MySpace. But even more so, these kids are interested in knowing the purpose, understanding their impact and ensuring a world that is healthy and happy. At the same time, you might be dealing with Generation-Xers that are going through their own career shifts to find that purpose and meaning.

These personal shifts create an interesting challenge for managers: how do you motivate and reward your employees? How do you create growth opportunities that are aligned with their own purposes? How do you ensure the meaning they are looking for matches yours? And, how do you keep those employees?

Our opportunities are global, so are our problems

Globalization is here to stay. No doubt, it has fueled the growth of many firms and improved the lives of many. Unfortunately, it is also highlighting the ever increasing divide between the rich and the poor. (Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making) Lets not forget terrorism, global warming or outbreak of a contagious disease.

As Albert Einstein pointed out “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” We need to increase our global reach by building virtual teams around the world. So far this activity has been mainly fueled by firms driven to reduce operational costs. However, we need to shift towards building cultural and social awareness of global communities, and bring that to our product and technology planning activities.

Finally, NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) doesn’t have a relevance in today’s global world. We can’t pretend that just because something doesn’t immediately impact us, we don’t have to care about it. The Story of Stuff highlights in a fun way how everything we do is connected. As consumers we are becoming more aware of how our purchasing decisions are shaping the world we live in. As businesses, we need to take to heart the concepts of: sustainability, zero waste, clean production, renewable energy and a more fulfilling purpose that fuels meaning for all.

Technorati Tags: globalization, sustainability, green

Jeff Housenbold, CEO of Shutterfly, recently spoke at Stanford’s Technology Ventures Program: Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders. I especially enjoyed his definition of entrepreneurship as well as how he applied this definition throughout his career.

I think entrepreneurship is mostly a state of mind. It is a state of mind about how you create things that people haven’t envisioned before. How you aggregate the resources, motivate people and execute against that vision. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to go start your own business. I think the state of mind of entrepreneurship can happen at the largest of corporations … and it can happen at the smallest companies …. Across the whole gamut, entrepreneurship is really about the state of mind: creating new products, creating new markets, creating new ideas, and then creating new businesses. And capturing some of the economic rents from that vision and the hard work.
– Jeff Housenbold

Enjoy the presentation. As you are listening to it, make sure to reflect back on your definition of entrepreneurship, your past experiences of applying it to your career, and explore the opportunities that exist for its application currently and in the future.

Technorati Tags: definition of entrepreneurship, Jeff Housenbold, Shutterfly

The destiny of the world is determined less by the battles that are lost and won than by the stories it loves and believes in. —Harold Goddard

Storytelling is an art. It is powerful, expressive, and perhaps the quickest path to building deep connections. When you are in the presence of a good storyteller, words take you beyond their meanings where you are presented to the world of possibilities. Its like living Sheherazade and hearing her stories from One Thousand and One Nights. I had the pleasure of working for a General Manager that had an amazing storytelling ability. Stories of our customers, competitors, market changes, hopes and dreams were his way of expressing his experiences, his vision and exploring how we could jointly create a new shared reality. For a startup within a large company, these stories are crucial for building a common future and a culture that would sustain itself when the going gets tough.

I can go on and on about the importance of storytelling for the innovation process and the leadership. However, Steve Denning summarizes the power of storytelling quite eloquently in his blog: The Secret Language of Leadership. You can read his summary here.

If you don’t know the trees you may be lost in the forest, but if you don’t know the stories you may be lost in life. —Siberian Elder

We are our stories. We tell ourselves stories about what we can and can’t do, how our world operates, and we use these stories to internalize what we experience daily through our clouded filters. If you like to know more about how our stories shapes our lives, take a look at Jim Loehr’s book The Power of Story: Rewrite Your Destiny in Business and in Life, and be ready to explore your own story.

I hope you can see the power of stories, their influence and impact in the innovation process as they shape and form our views of the world. I also hope that you recognize the importance of grounding ourselves when it comes to our stories, so that we are seeing them for what they really are. Before you read the rest of the post, take a moment and think about some of your own stories. Then, see if any of the ideas below can help ground them, so that they are more real.

Stories are a form of assumptions. However, before you take apart the whole plot piece by piece, step back and understand the overall theme, the key characters and the point of view needed for success. Evaluate each, and determine which ones need to be treated as assumptions and which ones are just flashbacks in your story that adds flavor and spice. Record each of these assumptions and start your validation and tracking process. Just as an example, an in depth understanding of your ecosystem is mandatory for a story that evolves around making your technology platform pervasive across the board. Some of those players within your ecosystem will be gatekeepers needing to be infiltrated, while others are accessory providers adding sugar and spice and something nice to your product. Make sure you are focusing on the right problems.

Get to know your storyteller. In the real world, our storytellers are a part of the human machinery that operates the thing called the corporate bureaucracy. The story might be great, and might even be true. But, if it doesn’t fit within the decision making structure of this bigger machine, it will never be a legend. So, get to know your storytellers, the structure and the decision making process they operate in. It will give you the opportunity to evolve your story, if it wasn’t quite right to begin with. Things such as, your firm’s hurdle rate, markets you operate in, revenue projections, type of customers you serve, resource and funding requirements will all play into your story somehow.

Everyone loves a good ending. So, understand your key metrics that you need to measure and track. Lets say that your story is referring to a target market size. Recognize that, it is actually talking about the addressable target market of your product, and put actions in place to grow that size overtime. Or, maybe your success truly depends on your customer connection. Then start building your customer relationship model and your brand where the customer is the keystone of your story from day one.

Every story has a point of view and a perspective that changes depending on the person involved. It is great to have different perspectives, angles and takeaways which will improve your creativity and innovativeness. However, you need common vocabulary, understanding and acknowledgement in order to execute “Ready all…Row” command properly. Take your customer knowledge as an example. Good analysis and understanding of your customer data is priceless. Yet, extracting this data unbiasedly, interpreting it appropriately and creating the right actions are your challenge. For more on this, check out How to Hear the Voice of Your Customers: Hone First-Person Intelligence From All Forms of Feedback by David Bean at MarketingProfs (registration might be required to access). So, use your stories well, and create the language and the vocabulary that your culture will understand and embrace.

Your stories have a structure (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution), and so should your innovation process. Milestones, stage-gate process, iterations, … are great way to ground yourself in the story while it evolves. Whatever process you use, make sure you have frequent checkpoints along the path to keep you honest and accountable.

Finally, share your stories with others and allow them to make it their own. Otherwise, when story is over everyone just goes home. Yes, a meaningful story can be inspiring. But for it to ignite the change you are hoping, individuals will need to believe in the story and make it their own for it to be real. In other words, when you pass the baton, someone is there to take and continue from where you left off, because they believe.

And remember: “The answer is always in the entire story, not a piece of it.” (Jim Harrison)

Technorati Tags: stories, storytelling, grounding yourself

Inspired by David Letterman, here is my Top 10 Signs You Need Help With Innovation Management.

Number 10. Just like a neurotic dog chasing its tail, you seem to be caught chasing a tail. You just can’t tell whose tail you are chasing: yours or your competitor’s.

Number 9. Your managements’ version of thriving on chaos feels more like the final hours on Titanic.

Number 8. Your company wrote the book on bureaucracy: the corporate barber offers volume discounts on pointy hairdos.

Number 7. You missed so many product launch windows that you are thinking about installing garage doors.

Number 6. Your product roadmap has taken its cue from NASA. You retired your core product without a replacement in the works, leaving your customers lost in space.

Number 5. Your data sheets read like John Kerry’s campaign speeches…

Number 4. Your employees refer to your idea management system as the roach motel. Ideas check in, and nothing checks out.

Number 3. Your strategic planning process resembles contestant elimination on a reality show.

Number 2. To reduce casualties, you erect a wall with security checkpoints between your R&D and marketing departments. Remember to use the buddy system: no one crosses the line alone!

And finally, Number 1. You are reading this blog

Happy weekend everyone!

It was the best of times… It was the worst of times… No worries, not when we have strategic agility.

Just as strategy’s roots come from the military with Sun Tzu, the foundations of strategic agility are thanks to Napoleon. By incorporating mobility and flexibility (corps d’armée system) combined with strong communication channels (communication backbone of marshals), Napoleon revolutionized the war strategies of his time. He recognized time as the key strategic element for his success, and gained a competitive advantage by identifying ways to dynamically organize and structure his attacks based on the latest information from the battlefront: a classic example of marrying strategic planning with strategic agility.

I don’t need to point out that our business environment has changed. For some, it might even feel a bit like a battlefront. Every day it is increasingly competitive, with an abundance of information available instantly to everyone, where constantly evolving technologies accelerate the commoditization cycle, not to mention we may be at the brink of an economic depression. With that, every strategic plan has the opportunity to become obsolete overnight, along with what was once your competitive advantage and differentiation. As they say, never a dull moment.

How well and how fast you predict, foresee, adjust, adapt and exploit opportunities in this ever changing environment defines your strategic agility quotient. With that, strategic agility is not just a nice to have. It should be embedded into your culture, your business processes and organization, and you should make it a key core competency and capability to enable continuous value creation for your company.

To foster strategic agility, you need to invest in many facets of your organization.

• Management by Objective (MBO): Originally rooted in HP’s management philosophy, MBOs are a great way to align your workforce to the ever-changing needs of your organization.
• Change management: Your efficiency and effectiveness at mastering change initiatives and handling uncertainty will improve your speed of execution and the flexibility of your organization.
• Communication backbone: Everyone in your organization needs to understand your business and the context for its success. Through this, they can understand the key triggers to watch, to act upon and more importantly their role for making it happen.
• Organizational learning: Your culture not only needs to embrace new and different, but also learn from past experiences.
• Organizational processes and structure: Without a well understood set of processes, new information and knowledge will be lost within the organization. Without an organizational structure that can effectively act on new information and knowledge (prioritization of projects, resources, …), one would be left wishing that the information was never observed.
• Organizational talent: With your HR team, you need to grow and recruit the needed talent and experience to execute for the future.
• Environmental scanning: Build in habits and provide tools for your organization to look for future trends. But don’t stop there; encourage communication and incorporation of your findings into future plans and activities.
• Ecosystem capabilities: You need to extend beyond your organization, to your ecosystem, and build capabilities and a communication backbone for faster response: customer relationship management, supply chain, distribution chain, manufacturing, IT, …
• Maintain a healthy balance: As with everything, you need to maintain a balanced view between adaptiveness, responsiveness, speed, cost, quality, functionality, brand and customer care.

Though strategic agility is a 2-word phrase, building the capability and skills to be strategically agile is more complex. Think of it as a pyramid of capabilities that build on each other, extending beyond your organization’s boundaries. You can utilize this framework to assess your strategic agility. Does your organization and your ecosystem have the intent, the focus towards scanning the horizon and beyond, and to what degree and depth? Do you have the right behaviors to support the intention: avoidance of analysis paralysis, creative analysis, systems thinking, the curiosity to explore and understand? Does your organization and ecosystem extend beyond now to understand new patterns formulating on the horizon, and work collectively to decode the hidden messages? Does your culture welcome new ideas and thoughts at every level? Do you have the processes and structures to make the necessary adjustments and strategic course corrections efficiently and effectively?

Strategic agility is not for everyone, at least not to the same degree. But, recognize that globalization and the speed of change is requiring every industry to embed some aspect of strategic agility into its core in order to survive, even if your sole differentiation is based on operational excellence. So, get to know thyself. Analyze your risk profile, communicate your key boundaries for decision making (hurdle rate, % of customers impacted, resources impacted, ..) and define your key change triggers that your organization must be aware of (new technology, new entrant, shifts in the economy, customer trends, …). Whatever your solution, make sure you are not the frog slowly being brought to a boil…

Technorati Tags: strategic agility, fostering strategic agility