5 Tips to Successfully Apply Product Innovation

Is it easy to implement innovations and perform like a great product innovator?

The Planview team discovered in their blog what product innovators are doing throughout the product development process to drive innovation.

They’ve shared 5 secrets about how to become a top performing product innovator. Here’re the extracts from their interesting article:

First secret: Strategy

Innovation is a key to any strategic initiative that helps companies grow.

The absence and strong strategy can lead to key targets not being met throughout product development projects. Creating a long-term strategic plan is the major secret top performers implement to meet their product portfolio goals.

Second secret: Be digital

It’s time to go digital. As you consider how to add technology to your product, it’s crucial to understand that the intricacy of these devices will only add challenges to the portfolio management process.

As products continue to digitally transform, product teams must do the same to their product portfolio management process.

Third secret: Data-driven decisions

Data is a major factor in product portfolio management.

Timely data helps project teams make smart decisions and keeps a project from stalling.

Data may come in many forms: trends, market research,  resource allocation, profits and losses, etc. Access to accurate and timely data plays such a crucial role in product portfolio management and top performers know this.

Fourth secret: results and repeatability

Working within a structured process makes product development more straightforward and provides the tools necessary to be successful.

One area that seems to be troublesome for most organizations is whether they should kill a product or project in the development process. It’s clear there isn’t always a definition or structured process on what signifies a failing project.

Continuous resource planning is where processes and data come together to really drive decisions for projects. Knowing that resource planning and killing projects should be a process and data-driven, not based on emotion, is the fourth secret of top performers.

Fifth secret: Get your house in order

Top performers are using a product portfolio management to:

  • improve visibility with access to a single source of truth on the product portfolio
  • improve resource utilization resulting in increased project capacity
  • eliminate reliance on spreadsheets and homegrown applications
  • improve and quicken decision making based on analytics and real-time calibrated reporting
  • reduce costs through process efficiencies

And this was the fifth secret.

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