While many people might see product innovation as solving a problem or an unmet market need, serial entrepreneur Dave Troy looks at things a little differently. Some of the best innovations, he says, solve a problem people didn’t even know they had. Taking inspiration from design innovators such as Don Norman, Tim Brown, and Daniel Pink, Troy runs down four elements that entrepreneurs can use to think about product innovation and development on his blog. For example: Design When you think about design, Troy says, you really are determining “how it works,” which is…
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The old adage of “the customer is always right” has been drilled into the brains of businesses for what seems like forever. But, in a post for the AtTask Work Management Blog, Ty Kiisel writes that this isn’t always the case, especially in project management. Kiisel writes that since the role between the project sponsor and the project manager is often not well defined, the sponsor sometimes assumes too much control of the project — which can lead to failure. He recounts an previous experience with a sponsor overstepping his bounds during product…
Over at Venture Fizz, NextView partner and co-founder Lee Hower recently took a look at the emerging impact of consumer web trends on business software, especially in product development and innovation. Hower says identifying these trends can be key to agile product development also. “I believe strongly that it will provide a thread of innovation for SaaS companies for the next 5+ years,” Hower writes. “The classic delineations of web products for business and consumer are only getting blurrier.” Hower highlights three reasons behind the upswing. Selling and customer acquisition Hower says that…
On his blog, Straight Talk, Nigel Hollis recently took issue with Facebook and the boom of unwanted interactivity that has come with its latest updates. Hollis specifically calls out the concept of “feature creep”, which he defines as when a brand adds new features to its product intended to enhance its performance. If Facebook seems complicated these days, maybe it’s because it actually is. He points out that many of the new features and inbound marketing nodes that are built into our daily internet use go unused. At some point, the extras become annoying and…
Over at Inform IT, veteran technology consultant Aaron Erickson discusses how businesses need to learn how to fail, a vital component, he writes, to product management and keeping your business agile. “[This article is about] recognizing [failure] and doing something about it,” he writes. “It’s about how you can save your company hundreds of millions of dollars by killing doomed projects early, before they become ‘too big to fail.’” In the article, Erickson discusses the reason many companies fall into the trap of massive project failure, how to identify if your project is failing…
Mike Cohn breaks down the three criteria that make for the perfect agile development project.
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While maintaining customer engagement is crucial for SaaS companies, sales teams also need the right tools to gauge involvement and use the data to improve sales. These marketing strategies are just a couple of talking points that David Skok outlines in a post on For Entrepreneurs. Skok writes that the clear goal for a SaaS CEO should be “to increase the profit they make from each customer while lowering the costs in sales and marketing that it takes to acquire each customer.” Measuring customer engagement, he writes, is key tool to achieving that goal.…
While pricing a product our service is never an easy task, SaaS adds even more variables to an already complex equation.
Fortunately, this also allows for tiered and multi-axis pricing, as entrepreneur and VC David Skok explains in a recent post. When pricing an SaaS product, it’s important to consider the features that are being purchased. Some features (and feature sets) should naturally have higher price tags associated with them. Scalable pricing is the answer to this pricing conundrum, Skok explains. A basic edition, for example, should provide a baseline price.…
The overall perception of products can sometimes be shortsighted. Think of the myriad ways a product impacts a company. If the product is a poor one, the employees won’t believe in it or the company. On the other hand, if the product is great, both company and product will be greatly supported. These scenarios can dictate the success or failure of a company. So to think that a product can’t influence company culture would be foolhardy. That’s the stance taken by Accuray founder John Adler and his son Trip Adler, CEO of Scribd. Both Adlers believe that product development, with its…
How did Evernote anticipate the rise of the smartphone and tablets? They didn’t, as CEO Phil Libin explains in this short video. They invested in the technology because they believed the possibility was there for a revolution. Essentially, they gambled. In the end, it’s clear that the company did so wisely. At the time, however, it was indeed a risk. When investing on a bet, it’s always vital to understand all of the risks and rewards involved, Libin says. You should have a firm understanding of what your bet entails before you willingly wager on it. Libin also stresses the importance…
