Open-minded product strategy: Allowing for disruptive accidental inventions

January 19, 2011

Gear up your new product development for the accidental home run

Some of the most popular products in the world today came about more or less as accidents. A recent article on Forbes lists 10 such products, and has a nice write up on how they surface. In some cases, unplanned actions in the manufacturing process led to a totally new product that transcended its origins. In other cases, a prototype of a product was repurposed for another use, for which it was much more eminently suitable and successful.

How can today’s software product management teams replicate these immensely profitable accidental discoveries? One might be more or less skeptical of this, because after all, in today’s supremely disciplined product management and development process, there is no room for unplanned steps or changes, nor is there enough time to toy around with ideas, lest they be overtaken by competitors. Product managers today live in a hectic, overdriven world that leaves little room for such chance invention.

This needs not be so. As with other managerial challenges, there are ways to encourage (for we cannot prescribe) inventions in an organization that start with People, Process and emPowerment.

In short, a great product manager will fill his team with a diverse group of people with different backgrounds and expertise. These people will build a set of product management processes that are both rigorous, yet flexible so that there is enough room for others to experiment, to try and fail, to cross fertilize their ideas, and to feel empowered to do so and take advantage of the organization’s resources.

For example, the well known 20% time allotment for developers at Google to work on their own projects is an example of “process” and “empowerment”. Many other large technology firms are creating the same “space” for their employees to innovate outside of the rigid development schedules of their core products.

Startup and expansion stage technology companies should embrace this even more, as they do not need to contend with the weight of organizational inertia, and rapid product development and innovation is key to their survival and/or continued growth. Furthermore, there are also many more ways to empower start up employees, for their roles are not as rigidly defined as in more established organizations.

Some other examples of process flexibility and empowerment I see at our portfolio companies are:

– Hiring fresh product management team members who bring a brand new set of skills and experience into a tight, well-knit existing team
– Creating a separate mini development team to pursue a new initiative
– Creating a “product innovation team” consisting of product management leaders and other executives to brainstorm on new product direction
– Allowing product development staff to work on very focused but comprehensive customer research that goes far beyond traditional customer feedback and satisfaction studies. Listening to the voice of the customer allows companies to really see new ways to add value and how their products can be repurposed for new uses.

I will be very glad to hear of other ways your organization is encouraging accidental inventions.

Chief Business Officer at UserTesting

Tien Anh joined UserTesting in 2015 after extensive financial and strategic experiences at OpenView, where he was an investor and advisor to a global portfolio of fast-growing enterprise SaaS companies. Until 2021, he led the Finance, IT, and Business Intelligence team as CFO of UserTesting. He currently leads initiatives for long term growth investments as Chief Business Officer at UserTesting.