Yes, I'm referring to that concept found in the 'Tipping Point' by Malcolm Gladwell. In his book, he asks the question, "Why is it that some ideas or behaviors or PRODUCTS start epidemics and others don't?". He follows up with another question, "And what can we do to deliberately start and control positive epidemics of our own?". I enjoyed the book, and I wanted to mention the 'stickiness factor', I guess because I recently saw this picture, and thought of it. This is a picture of a virus tha...

  Keith Goffin’s webinar, Identifying Customers’ Hidden Needs, was presented March 14, 2012. Many senior managers want their organizations to develop breakthrough products and ask their R&D departments to come up with the equivalent of the iPod or iPhone. Unfortunately, most organizations struggle to come up with novel product concepts, and of the thousands of new products developed worldwide each year, product failure is more common than success. A key cause of failure is that new pr...

Throughout a development cycle, product management and R&D teams spend countless hours trying to figure out how to build and release products that will make a significant impact in the market and be loved by customers. In other words, the game changer. This elusive game changer often has people caught up in deciding which cool feature to add to the product, instead of focusing on a well-defined product vision and direction. No matter what you might think, there is rarely a single magical fe...

It seems like everyone is talking about this. I have to laugh and wonder if this is like hunting for Waldo or Carmen. Well, I was asked my opinion...so here we go, one more silly love song. First of all we need to be clear: the product manager is part of a team. Which makes this whole blog post kind of simple. The product manager is always on the product management team. That's where he or she is. Really, a pretty short blog post. But...it's not so simple and many issues arise because of poorly ...

I'm putting this innovation lifecycle back up to provide context of what I'm addressing. I'm still focusing on Stage 0. In part 1, I talked about idea generation and handling, in this part I'll be talking about opportunity identification, and then part 3 will focus on opportunity analysis. Opportunity Identification: There are people out there who wouldn't know an opportunity if it hit them in the back of the head. Well, in truth most of us are a little like this. As in so many things, part o...