“Innovation”, “product innovation” are being used by everyone these days. A google search on “product innovation” returns 169 million results. A search for books on product innovation on Amazon returns over 10,800 books. Sure enough it is one of the most frequently used business buzzword these days. We all have heard phrases like “Innovate or die” - so what exactly is product innovation.

My colleague Rick Chin, Director of Product Innovation and Marketing at SolidWorks (yes, even people’s titles have product innovation in them these days :-)) came up with six criteria (at least one of which has to be satisfied) that can be used as a lens to evaluate possible solutions before they can be considered a product innovation.  According to Rick, these criteria work best when you have a lot of ideas to solve a problem.

Customers will call something innovative if:

1)  If it solves a problem that really matters - Look for a really strong emotion from the customers like frustration.

2) The solution is truly effective - not just effective, but very effective in solving the customer need.

3) Its effectiveness is instantly obvious - this is when customers say “Wow” when they see the product in use for the first time.

4) It is familiar, comfortable, easy to adopt - if the product intimidates, it will not be used.

5) It’s realistic to implement - this sounds obvious, but consider this before starting to implement the solution.

6) It is an unexpected solution - this is what people normally call innovation and the least important on the list.

1.

I have been asked quite a few times over the past couple of years in what skills are needed to do well as a product manager. While there is no guaranteed recipe for success as a product manager (a very versatile, wear-multiple-hat role), I look for some specific generic skills in product managers. While I was at SolidWorks, we did not talk to candidates unless they met our baseline for technical skills. So when we did interview candidates, I personally looked for the following skills:

1) Listening skills: As a product manager, you need to know how to listen to your customers. You should have the ability to listen to them so that you can discover unmet needs in the marketplace that if solved can contribute to the growth of your company. To do this effectively, you should be willing to let go of your preconceived notions of customer needs and be willing to discover the real painpoints.

2) Team building and Leadership skills: Are you a person who has exhibited leadership skills? This is because as a product manager you are typically required to lead cross functional teams where none of the members report to you - you have to lead by influence. Do you have the skills to earn the trust of others and lead them along a path that may have ups and downs? A lot of times you are embarking on a journey to uncharted territories. Do you have the skills not only to keep your chin up, but also to carry your team along with you? It is all about relationships folks, not products.

3) Communication skills: Do you have the ability to communicate in very simple terms with a strong passion? How have you sold your business case(s) to internal/external stakeholders? Are you persuasive in your message to make people trust you? Do you have the ability to break down complex topics into simple messages? (none of the “this is the most reliable, scalable, easy to use, next generation product” crap. Can you talk like how real people do?)

4) Your passion: Why do you want to be here? Do you have the sparkle in your eyes? Does your strong passion to build something new show on you? Will you walk through a wall if you have to? Not in an aggressive way, but will you persevere enough to succeed when the going gets tough?

5) Your personality: Are you someone your team would welcome into the existing culture? Again, folks it is all about building relationships and “trust” with your team. Have you shown this at your previous jobs?

For me, I would rather hire someone who has the positive attitude than someone who may be technically the most brilliant. Positive attitude allows one to cross what appears to be insurmountable hurdles and carry your team with you. Lack of positive attitude is cancerous and is sure recipe for failure and brilliance cannot make up for it.

Now do you need an MBA to become a good product manager? It depends. I don’t have anything against MBA’s, as long as you still continue to use your common sense to solve problems (I have met some MBA’s that have really made me wonder if they lost their common sense while at business school). The above skills are what I think product managers need to invest in and if they do the rest of the technical/business/financial skills needed to become a product manager can be easily learned.

After 11 fun years at SolidWorks, I am leaving to pursue a new career opportunity. I consider myself lucky to have worked at such an awesome company during a time when it grew from a startup to a force in the CAD industry. In 1996, it was the second job of my fledgling career and I don’t think I could have done it any better. I learned so much during these 11 years, got to contribute to a product used by hundreds of thousands of product designers, worked with some of the smartest people I have met and made so many friends over the years amongst my colleagues and customers alike.

Now it is time to move on and do the next big thing in my career. It is hard to leave a place where I knew so many people who shared the good and bad times during the different business cycles. But I believe that I will never know what I will find next unless I try. It could be the next big success or failure, but the learning cannot continue unless I try. I wish all my colleagues the very best in personal and business success for years to come.

I thought this would be a great opportunity to list the top 11 things that I learned at SolidWorks (yes, there is a lot more than 11) in the last 11 years that will guide me for the rest of my working life.

1. Hiring is the most important thing you do at work and always hire people smarter than you: Team success is what will determine your business success, so why not have people smarter than you working for/with you? If you have to micromanage someone or babysit them to do the tasks, why hire them? Hire slowly and make sure you have done due diligence.

2. A manager’s success is all about making his/her reports successful in what they do: Once you are a manager, it is not about “you” anymore. It is all about your team. Your job is to ensure that you are making your reports successful in their job. You have to ensure that their strengths are fully utilized. You will be judged by your team’s success.

3. You cannot move up in the company unless you train your replacement: You have to make sure that you are dispensable by training your replacement. Otherwise, you cannot move up and take up another position within the company. Pay attention when you are hiring – can your new hire replace you one day? Thanks to Aaron Kelly for teaching me this. I would not have made my move from Product Definition to Strategic Marketing without Bruce Holway.

4. It is all about “relationships” and not “products”: This is true whether it is with customers, colleagues, partners and resellers. When someone buys from you or when your colleagues work with you, you are winning their trust and they are making an investment in you. Trust once broken, cannot be repaired. Relationships you build will outlive any technology or product. In other words, it is all about “people” and not “products”.

5. Only viewpoint that matters is that of the customer: The answer is not in the building. You have to get out and talk to real customers and understand their “pain points”. In fact, none of the people in the building will buy your product, only your customers do. So take the time to figure out what your customers need and then solve their pain points with a kick ass solution. Worry about the competition, but worry more about what customers need. Respect the customer.

6. There is a big difference between products that customers will “buy” vs. products customers “like”: You should only be solving problems that customers are willing to pay money for (in some cases, you make money via the network effect that is generated by solving problems – eDrawings, 3D ContentCentral are prime examples). After all, business needs to make money to stay around (there are no two ways about it !). It does not make business sense to solve problems customers don’t care about. Never get enamored with technology and then start looking for problems that the technology can solve. Do it the other way. Find the real customer problems and then find the best technology to solve these problems and then make money out of it.

7. Be “market driven” and not be “marketing driven”. There is a big difference: Never thought how big a difference adding “ing” to a word could make.

8. Have technical and business arguments with colleagues as long as none of it turns personal: Make sure that all perspectives are considered when devising the best possible solution for a customer’s problem. Have heated technical/business debates if you want, but never ever make any of these arguments/disagreements personal. When you have these disagreements and then make a decision, you at least know that you have considered all possible solutions and picked the one that is the best. After all, the customer does not care whose idea it was, to them the idea came from SolidWorks. Either all of us are going to look like heroes or a bunch of idiots. Which would you rather be?

9. Have meetings before the meeting: If you are asked to present to a large group of people meet with the key stakeholders one on one before your big meeting. You do not want to get ambushed because you did not do due diligence on the material you are presenting. Meet with them one on one before hand and make sure to get their feedback on your thinking and ask specifically for any concerns they may have. You would then have time to do more research to address those concerns or list them as risks. If you do this right, the final meeting should be one of consensus and no “surprises”.

10. Trying and failing is a lot better than failing to try: All successful people have failed more than they have succeeded. No one writes about their failures. Failing to try is trying to fail. Never forget the lessons you learn from these failures. There is no better learning method than trying and failing, but never fail the same way twice. I have to thank SolidWorks for all the wonderful opportunities over the last 11 years to try new things and having the luxury to fail and learn from these failures.

11. Execution is the key to being successful: History is filled with people/companies who had great ideas and got nowhere because they did not execute. Devil is in the details. Many times, flawless execution can compensate for any flaws in the idea as long as you quickly iterate and continue to execute. Execution is the key.

You have decided to get out of your office and embark on the journey of discovering unmet needs of customers by talking to customers and listening to them express their unmet needs. One of the pitfalls to avoid is talking to the same customers - customers that you know very well, those that that love your product - and then claiming that you have gone through the motions of talking to customers. If you do this, you will end up making a product that meets the needs of the few.

You have to keep rotating the customers you talk to. You cannot be talking to the same customers over and over again. Find customers you have never visited, new customers who have just bought your product, or customers who have been using your product for a long time. You should be prepared to listen to customer who may not have all good things to say about your product. In fact bad news is the best good news you could get from a customer visit, because they are actionable pieces of information you could take back and get fixed. But, bear in mind that just because one or two customers told you that they liked something or absolutely hate something in your product, it does not mean that the whole world shares that opinion.

What has worked me in the past is making customer visits something I do all the time throughout the year. I try to be out of the building one day a month visiting two customers during that day. Make it part of your working culture. If you are going somewhere attending a conference or on a pre-sales call or to visit some particular customer, try to find other customers in the area that you have never visited and extend your stay by a day and visit them. This lets you justify the travel expense you would have incurred anyways.

Good sources for names of customers you could possibly visit include:

1. Your tech support
2. Enhancements database (if you have one)
3. Your sales organization
4. Existing customers (they always know someone else that you could visit in their area)
5. Prospects database

Figure out your objectives of doing the customer visits (what are you trying to accomplish) and then try to figure out who you need to talk to. Then make sure more than 50% of those you would talk to would be first time customers who you never talked and listened to.

I am sure everyone is inundated with emails these days. We also have become notorious in generating a lot of these emails at work. As product managers, we are constantly required to stay in constant touch with our team members in development, quality assurance, sales, documentation, product marketing, press, PR, customers, partners and you name it.

But is there a way to tame this email monster such that it does not become a productivity killer for us and for others. I remembered a good set of tips that one of my colleagues Graham Rae, VP R&D Operations at SolidWorks (my current employer) had send us way back in 2003. I dug this up and even to this day, these are great tips to reduce the email volume. I still use them and they help a lot.

Enjoy and hopefully you can find them useful. Thanks Graham for these valuable tips.
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Reply to all
This is the number 1 cause of controllable email excess. Most of us are guilty of perpetuating the Reply To All habit without considering the volume of unwanted email we are generating and the potential follow on explosion as the recipients exacerbate it by following up with their Replies To All. You should always consider trimming the list of people you respond to rather than doing an automatic Reply to All:

• Always ask yourself if the entire original distribution list really needs to see your specific response
• Can the distribution list be pruned as the issue comes to closure? For example some people on the list may want to see the first email that defines the issue and the last email that defines the solution or the options – the details in between are not always of interest to everyone on the distribution list
• For general announcements that go to all encompassing distribution lists like corporate distribution lists. Never use Reply to All

Distribution lists
Replying to Distribution lists can generate 10’s or 100’s of redundant emails. Again, consider if the list can be trimmed back:
• Check to see who’s on the Distribution list (double click the Distribution List to show its members). Some Distribution lists are made up of a concatenation of smaller Distribution lists – consider if one of the smaller lists would be more appropriate
• If you have Office 2003 or later, you can click the [+] sign in front of the Distribution List and it will expand to the individual members – you can then delete individual names from the list
• Check to see what Distribution Lists you’re included on that no longer apply to you. This may help reduce the amount of mail you receive. To check this:
o Create a dummy email and enter your own name
o Right mouse button over your name and select Properties. Select the “Member Of” tab. If you want to be removed form a list, select the list to find out who owns it and request they remove you.

Be economical with words
Get your point across succinctly, politely and quickly. Long emails sometimes get pushed off to be read later and may not get read to their end! – a problem if you’ve made your main point in the final few sentences.

Using the To versus Cc list
Many people have their Cc’d email go to a different Inbox folder or use a different color to identify they are Cc’d only. When you send an email or reply to an email, consider moving recipients from To list to the Cc list to help them prioritize their email. You can select and drag names between To and Cc fields.

Consider the alternatives to email that may work faster/better
Most people work better as a team when they get to know each other. Email alone doesn’t create close working relationships. Substituting email by phone calls/face-to-face discussions/meetings or webEx will over time improve overall communication and potentially reduce email. This is especially true if the person is within a few offices of your own.

If an issue is diverging, taking too long to close or the ball has been dropped then a meeting may be the way to go. Short focused meetings may be far more effective at getting agreement and decisions quickly – many times email simply can’t compete with a meeting.

Although our culture is one of fast/immediate response, some issues/questions may be able to wait until your next group meeting rather than having an email discussion

Avoid email for expressing strong emotion/strong disagreement or criticism
It’s easier to be mis-interpreted via email than by the spoken word. It’s usually far better to have these dialogs face to face or by telephone so that your emotion is not misinterpreted and you can have a 2 way conversation in real time. Make personal visits/use the telephone more often – especially if the issue is controversial or there is strong disagreement. Email messages in this situation can do more harm than good. Good working relations (especially across groups) aren’t established via email, they’re established and enhanced by personal contact

Read your email before you send it
Check:
• Can it be shortened
• Is it clear and unambiguous
• Is the tone correct
• Can the Distribution list be reduced
• Does it contain needed “calls to action”
• If you disagree with what’s being proposed in an email, offer alternative proposals/solutions
• You have included any intended attachments (surprising how many emails use Reply To All with “you forgot the attachments”)

I have found this picture to be very hilarious and after having talked to different people working in different companies, I am led to believe this is very true in a lot of companies. (I give the credit to the original creator of this picture whose name is unknown to me)

To avoid the above situation, in my opinion a product manager has to do three fundamental things:

1) Thoroughly understand the customer problem, rather than taking what the customer tells you at face value. Need to do a deep dive with the customer using the concept of Five why’s. While doing this, you need to make sure you need to involve your engineers/qa etc. or take the time to educate them about the customer problem that needs to be solved.

2) Engage the customer throughout the product development process to ensure that you are building what he is really looking for. My mantra is that it is never too early to show anything to your customers. Sign NDA’s if you have to, but engage them early. Get them to review specs, let them play with early code. The whole idea is to know if you are building the right thing, that you are rowing the boat in the right direction. The boat could be leaking water at this time because it is not finished, but you want to make sure that you are building the right boat and rowing it in the right direction.

3) Educate other departments in your company about the customer problem and why you are creating this product/service so that they can align their tasks with what you are trying to do.