What Does Product Management Do?
Let’s start with the definition of what we at go3consulting think Product Management is about and what we are working with our clients from: To deliver measurable business results through products and solutions that meet both user and customer needs as well as company...
Introducing the Product Peer Group
As a start-up company, we at go3consulting are constantly challenging our own beliefs and approaches. Based on our own past experiences we are very familiar with the challenges of moving targets, task overload and input (not only by stakeholders and customers), as...
Too Little, Too Late – The Status Quo in Innovation
Before releasing the findings of our survey on innovation in D-A-CH we had an argument on about how to title them. Initially we thought about "too little, too late". However, that seemed a bit harsh. So we ended up with "room for improvement“. But then - often it...
Access to Users is Key to the Success of Innovation Efforts
We have recently run a number of innovation workshops based on the Design Thinking approach. One success factor that clearly emerged from all of them: access to the users or - even better - direct involvement of users in the design process leads to more innovative...
“Need Seekers” are the Most Successful Innovators
The recently released 2013 edition of the Booz & Company “Global Innovation 1000” report states that companies classified as “Need Seekers” show a superior financial performance over their innovating peers. Need Seekers - described by Booz & Company as the...
Nimble Product Management™
In an environment driven by rapid market and methodology change, we are seeing a number of our mid-size enterprise clients and prospects increasingly struggle with their current Product Management setup. Agile/SCRUM has become a reality on the R&D end, but Product...
Where does Product Management Belong in an Organization?
When I first got to run a product organization, I reported to the Director of Marketing in the larger Sales & Marketing department. In a way it seemed to make sense at the time, Marketing was about understanding of and communicating to prospects and customers. So...
Four Steps to Creating Great Products
Working on another Design Thinking project I just came across this condensed version of an original HBR blog post by Warren Berger (http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/07/the_four_phases_of_design_thin.html) that sums up the four important steps: Question. Don’t just ask the...
ABC Nightline – IDEO Shopping Cart
[video_player video_type="youtube" video_id="M66ZU2PCIcM"] The seminal video on the Design Thinking process.
Optimizing and Accelerating New Product Development
One of our clients is facing a typical challenge: management’s dissatisfaction with the speed and quality at which new products are reaching the market. One could obviously argue that management will always like new products to be introduced ever more quickly, but in...
Design Thinking – a Risk to Innovation?
With Design Thinking becoming quite a bit of a buzzword, IDEO’s Kelley brothers being featured all over Harvard Business Review, and Jonathan Ive taking control over products at Apple I have recently seen a few posts from engineers questioning the increasing focus on...
What Makes a Product Manager
In my consulting engagements over the past few years I have seen quite a few business cards with “Product Manager” printed on them, that in the context of the actual roles the respective holders were filling, kind of puzzled me. While the term Product Management is...
81% of CEOs Do not See Their Investment in Innovation Pay off
A couple of days ago I came across the rather scary result of an Accenture survey: Only 19% of the CEOs of more than 500 British, French, and US companies interviewed in the study saw their investments in “innovation” pay off. At the same time apparently more than 90%...
Design by Committee
“Product should be a dictatorship, not consensus-driven. There are casualties, hurt feelings, angry users. But all of those things are necessary if you’re going to create something unique. …” Michael Arrington Faced with a situation at one of my clients where this...
Simplicity
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” Leonardo da Vinci I think many of us doing products have encountered what we used to call “feature creep”. Products that started out as simple and beautiful concepts getting added more and more “must have” features ahead of...