Steven Fransblow's presentation on building innovation dynasties at BPMA

Steven Fransblow of Innosight gave an eye-opening talk this week at the Boston Product Management Association November meeting on the JOBS™ approach to successful innovation.

The JOBS™ blueprint focuses on four key issues:
J: Job - What is the problem to be solved for a specific consumer and set of circumstances?
O: Objective - What are the functional, social, and emotional metrics of purchase and use?
B: Barriers - What are the financial, skill, time, access, and behavioral obstacles that prevent the job from getting done satisfactorily.
S: Solutions - What are the products, services and compensating behaviors that can overcome the barriers, achieve objectives, and satisfy the requirements.

One of Steven's key points was that successful innovation does not mean making "perfect products". It means making products that delight customers without overshooting the requirements which often leads to schedule delays, cost overruns and uncessesary complexity that detracts from successful adoption.

In addition to books published by Innosight, and an MIT Sloan article, Finding the Right Job for Your Product Steven provided the following free online resources for more information.

Strategy & Innovation: Innosight’s newsletter focusing on strategies for business growth.

Innosight’s blog highlighting recent disruptive innovations

Best,
Chuck

Charter for Compassion

3-1/2 minutes of inspiration worth watching. It came to me from TED Ideas worth spreading.

I Voted

Product Camp Boston coming in 2009 - update

Updated Dec 11- 2008: The date and venue have been set. February 28, 2009 -at Microsoft Startup Labs, Cambridge, MA. Check the wiki for updates.

I'm helping some BPMA members promote Product Camp Boston. The target time frame is the end of February 2009. Your vote will help decide the exact date.

ProductCamp is a collaborative gathering of Product Management and Marketing professionals who come together to learn, share, and interact with their peers. ProductCamp has no attendees, only participants. Everyone who attends is expected to actively participate in leading a session, round table discussion, speaking on the topic at hand, or volunteering.

Bar Camp has been around since 2005 - they tend to focus on technology, social networking and other topics, although Bar Camp might be of interest to some Product Mangers, our field is not typically a primary focus.

The first Product Camp was in Silicon Valley in Q1 - 08 followed by Austin Texas in June. Product Camp uses the Bar Camp format while focusing on Product Management Topics.

Get involved. It promises to be an exciting day!

keywords: ProductCamp Boston, PCamp, Product Camp

Marc Lesser: Accomplishing More By Doing Less

I'll make time to watch this Google talk.

Boston Product Managment Association Career Panel

The Career Panel and job fair organized by Leslie Ament was a memorable event. Space was tight, because the room was at capacity - breaking all past BPMA attendance records. The panelists were articulate, informative and sometimes humorous, keeping the attendees deeply engaged.

My favorite gems that came out of the panel were:

Sally Silver: Employers are looking for knowledge, skill, experience and accomplishments. Attitude and preparation, confidence and energy are the keys to communicate these characteristics.

I'm not sure if it was Lynn Tartaglia or Dora Vell who said: "Never turn down a job that you haven't been offered." They both talked about being willing to explore opportunities - you never know where they might lead.

Sally Silver: You cant be a buyer and a seller at the same time. If you want the job, you need to be a seller first. After convincing the employer you have the characteristics to succeed, is the time to become a buyer and let the employer convince you to join the company.

Lynne Tartaglia: How to stand out: 1) Capture my attention & leave me with a unique and memorable idea. 2) Convince me you know the technology without killing me. 3) Know what you want- keep in mind employers pay for value.

Dianne Condon, Patricia O'Neil, & Sally Silver: Develop relationships with hiring managers. Although they are busy and hard to reach, when they need help, recruiting is their top priority.

Great job by Leslie, George, Ferenc, Jon, Karen, Sarela, Jane, and the entire BPMA team who pulled this together!

photos by BPMA member Doug Bonin. Visit Doug's Flickr page for more

Understanding and profiting from variability

Malcom Gladwell’s TED talk “What we can learn from spaghetti sauce” articulates a fundamental shift in science and economics from old school thinking. Until recently, the focus was identifying universal rules or the best single solution to a market problem. Over the last ten to fifteen years, the revolution in science and economics has been to understand variability and seek clusters of solutions that provide a better fit across the population and better satisfy market needs. In the past, scientists, psychologists, economists tended to seek universal rules that govern how everyone behaves. The recent trend is away from a single optimal solution toward understanding and taking advantage of variability.



“What we can learn from spaghetti sauce” describes how Howard Moskowitz learned to apply Rule Developing Experimentation (RDE) the systematic process of designing, testing and modifying alternative ideas, and products in a disciplined way so that the developer and marketer discover what appeals to the customer, even when the customer can't articulate the need.