We can always dream up more product bells and whistles, but the important ones truly advance the flexibility of a product to meet real world needs. When allocating resources, we have to balance the desire to boldly go where no product has gone before, with the mundane need to fix ‘broken windows’ and put a fresh coat of paint on tired older elements of the foundation. I am an advocate of periodically requiring the product/engineering team to perform an entire customer implementation from start to finish. Three benefits will come of it. The first is it will highlight for the product/engineering team all the places where “people putty” is required to fill a gap in deploying the product. The benefit of closing the gaps will be a significant increase in implementation efficiency, shorter launch windows, and faster time to value for customers. Secondly, it will build a stronger understanding of the customers’ journey and needs, and hopefully create more empathy. Lastly, it will serve as an engine for innovation.
How many times have you had the experience of doing something and when you finished you suddenly had a flash of an idea about how you could have done it better or differently. To innovate you need to understand the status quo so that you know what you are innovating and why. There is a difference between innovation and invention. Invention is creating something new and unique. According to the U.S. Patent office “an invention can only be considered patent-eligible if it is new, non-obvious, and useful.” This is in the camp of boldly going where no product has gone before, and for a portion of our product / engineering journey, we need to be on the path to creating capabilities that meet this definition. However, we also need to invest in the more mundane innovations that simply ensure we have the best product on the market.