Milestones for the Product Development & Release Process

One of the challenges facing product managers is how to manage the product development and release process so that other teams in the organizations are involved and informed. I have found that having scheduled "information" milestones coupled with a multi-discipline  product release team usually simplify this process.

Embracing User Innovation

The Fall edition of MIT's Sloan Review - titled "The Age of the Consumer-Innovator" - contains a number of articles on how consumers innovate to extend and enhance products they use to better suit their individual needs. A prominent researcher and author in the area of consumer (or user) innovation is MIT's Professor Eric von Hippel. A lot of Professor von Hippel's research is summarized in his e-book Democratizing Innovation, which is definitely worth reading. The book highlights research conducted with 3M that showed that innovations generated by users of 3M products were forecast to generate eight times more revenues than those innovations generated internally within 3M. Furthermore, these user innovations were more strategically important to 3M, had a higher probability of success, and provided a greater competitive differential than the internally generated innovations. All in all, a very compelling argument for embracing innovations that are generated by users. The real question is how can you do this? How can you tap into the inventiveness of your customer base and leverage their ideas and innovations to the betterment of your products?