Innovation

One of the challenges of being a Product Manager is ensuring that your "Product" stays competitive and in demand in the market place.

During the SAP Partner Summit this past March, Dr. Geoffrey A Moore presented a view of what this challenge really encompasses. There are four phases:

1. Invent - coming up with a novel idea or enhancement ... I prefer the term "innovation"; Dr. Moore used "invention"
2. Deploy - in my world this takes the innovation/invention and turns it into something that can be implemented/sold over and over, packaging might be a better term
3. Manage - this is the phase where the "Product" is being sold and deployed
4. Offload - at this point the "product" has reached the end of it's life and it's time to let it go.

The third phase is where most of the money is to be made. Often, though, we loose sight of the fact that this third phase will come to an end. Instead, we tend to want to stay in this phase as long as possible, trying our best to "tweak" the product and end of investing way too much to keep the products going.

In reality what we need to decide is either to re-enter the Invent phase to see what we can do to improve reinvent the product, or Offload it and find something new. This is perhaps the most crucial step for a Product Manager.

I've begun to read another book of Dr. Moore's: Dealing with Darwin. I will have more on this once I get further along.