 Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining our webinar about product management and innovation. Today, we're going to look at how product managers can innovate for the product by using the innovation funnel and how we can transform innovative ideas into concrete goals in products. I'll start with a quick intro myself. So, I'm a Caterina. I'm a product manager, a growth for Prime Europe. And I bring several years of product management experience focused on building customer-facing features, improving the customer experience. I enjoy tapping into end-user needs to get inspired for new experiments and product features. So, today, I want to cover three main points. Why innovation is a key element of the product management role and we should be thinking about it constantly. How we can manage the innovation process by channeling it into a funnel and how we can turn our ideas into concrete products and shaping them into smart goals. So, we often think about something radical when talking about innovation. In fact, innovation is about coming up with new and better ways of doing something. So, it could be a new feature, which is part of the product growth method, like a new mobile feature or a UX redesign or a new way of presenting something. For example, developing a process to automate and save manual effort required to perform a task. By nature, product managers are constantly curious. They always ask themselves, how can I make a product better? How this can serve better than any customers? How can I bring more value to it? On the other side, innovation extends the product life cycle. In fact, if we look at Fortune 500 lists featuring 500 biggest companies by animal revenue, only 52 companies stayed on the list since its inception in 1955. This raised the importance of how bringing constant product innovation is important to keep the product life and then also make the whole business work. So, innovation and product managers have the same goal. They both target the end user and they are meant to bring value to them. Innovation usually starts with an idea. Ideas can be many, so we need to find a way to categorize them and start understanding which ones are more important. So, in order to configure them, we can adopt a matrix called innovation matrix, which is based on two key inputs. Are we implementing a new or an existing technology? And are we addressing a new or an existing market? Most radical innovations are both using a new technology and opening a new market. We can think, for example, about crypto industry or 3D printers. On the opposite side, we have architectural innovations. They leverage existing technology to take them to another feat. We can think about the Uber case. Right sharing, geolocation and freelance worker were already existing and were in fact nothing new. But combined, however, they became a kind changing innovation that served the standout example of the sharing economy, which right now is also sometimes called the Uberification. Instructive innovation happens when a new market is created or we change the way consumers usually interact with it. We can think, for example, about the streaming services, but also about the Apple iPod. So, the first iPod was released in 2001 and it was basically offering a portable media player that could hold an average of roughly 1000 songs. It's on the iPod was not an attempt by Apple to make instructive innovation. Already similar media players were existing, although the iPod was considered a better product than the majority of them. Instead, Apple's first example of instructive innovation was a combination of the iPods and the simultaneous release of the iTunes. So, the iTunes Store, which was like a music marketplace combined with the iPod being a media library which allowed instant access to music, locked iPod users into a purchasing music from iTunes Store. But most importantly, it offered convenience in terms of price for the end users. Last day, we have the incremental innovation and I think they're the most common for product features and driven for product managers. They describe a series of gradual improvements which then result in large-scale organizational changes. This is also the most accessible form of innovation as it often can be performed without requiring huge budget investments and it can be also linear into decision-making process. So, let's see how actually we can manage innovative ideas and bring them to life by leveraging the innovation funnel. So, innovation funnel for product management is made of four main steps. It all starts with the ideation, where we can unleash our creativity and bring as many ideas as we want, actually, the more the better. But of course, we need to find a way to prioritize them. So, that's why we filter and prioritize ideas by assessing their feasibility and possible impact. The most promising one are then being built and tested so then we can scale best performance while getting learning from the remaining ones. This all actually is meant to drive continuous innovation for the product so that it's not just a one-off ideation which you're driving once a year or maybe twice a year, but you're continuously thinking what else can be done and then also input this into the product roadmap. So, it all starts with ideas. There are several ways to generate ideas. We can look at trends, we can look at quantitative analysis, we can look at qualitative analysis, user anecdotes and surveys. So, there are many ways to tackle ideation. So, how, where we can start from? One way to develop products which will actually bring value to the end customer is to start from the customer needs and work backwards from them. To deeply understand user needs, we can ask questions, collect feedback into a centralized repository which is then consulted for ideation sessions. Or sometimes also, we can just put ourselves into the customer shoes. What will a product make a product easier to use? What problem is my idea solving? What could make myself happy about this product? As an example, Amazon Go was trying to address the customer problem to wait in line the checkout and trying to find an automated way to skip the line and make the checkout process faster. Developing a product with customer reminder also reduces time to market and the cost of experimentation. In fact, it will also help to reduce the risk of failure while not being limited by competitors or trends which might be temporary. So, you don't want to be the product which is just based as something which is one-off and will not be scalable in the future. Once we get an idea, the next step is actually to assess ideas' visibility both in terms of impact, purpose and resources required. This will help us moving forward towards the building phase. So, which of the many ideas we have in mind we should be prioritized on your roadmap? One way to assess ideas' perspective is to leverage a framework which will clearly explain how the customer will benefit from your idea if this will be launched. At Amazon, for example, we leverage the press PR FAQ which is a standardized framework in the format of a six-page document made of three key sections. There is a customer-facing PR. There is a series of internal frequency answer questions which we ask ourselves and which ones which are meant to color the CX from end to end. Let's go quickly one by one. So, the PR, the press release part. The press release part needs to be very crisp. It's actually supposed to be no longer than one page and it presents the idea as if it was launched and it was covered by the press. The goal here is to provide the retrospective of your idea from an external point of view. So, just imagine if your idea tomorrow was launched so how this should be issued on the press how do you think will be perceived externally? The FAQ part is made up of two sections we have internal FAQs and external FAQs both for means to cover to understand the purpose of the idea you're driving. External FAQs address questions that customer and other external stakeholders might be asking. So, we're answering questions like for example how would I learn about this feature? How, what is the value added? How would it be better if compared to what I'm currently using? Internal FAQs are actually addressing questions that internal stakeholders might ask and those questions are actually meant to cover the process following the building site. For example, they may ask which resources are required to launch this? How we measure the success when we want to launch this? We can use simple language when putting an idea in writing. This will help also ourselves to make the feasibility assessment easier to understand and easier for us and for the stakeholders involved while bringing clarity on the end goal purpose. As product managers, I think that we are deeply involved in the product we are managing. So, I think we should not only be relying on the data but also on the personal instance of a product. So, beside the data, we can make an effective way to cover the idea and once again support you in the feasibility analysis phase. In a nutshell, when turning an idea into a possible product and convincing actually your stakeholder that an idea should be incremented and turned into a product, we can follow the approach of setting up a smart goal. So, what does the smart framework mean? It means that the idea you're driving should be pursuing a specific goal. So, this will make us go into detail on why, on what the idea will achieve and how we'll reach it. For example, we want to say that this idea will increase number of global subscribers. This may be accomplishing but adding this feature or performing a certain, say, refresh. Every idea needs to be measurable. So, quantify the goal. Make sure that this is measurable because this will also make easier to track the progress and understand when you're reaching the finish line. That's why we say if we progress farther with example, I want to, my idea will drive membership growth by X percent. As we're in the phase when we're just setting the idea, we also want to ask ourselves if this idea is achievable. So, is your objective something your team can recently accomplish? Do we have the resources for it? So, regarding the achievability of a product it's much easier when you're in the one setting it and you're still in an early phase. Every goal needs to be relevant. So, here's when you need to take a step back and think about the big picture. Why are you proposing to drive forward this idea? Why are you setting this goal? And finally, we also need to have some time frames. So, we need to give ourselves some timelines like when we want to develop, when we want to launch a minimum value of product, how we want to measure it and what is the roadmap look like. Once the idea has been assessed and received the green light for building we can start building and testing the idea we've been working on so far. There are several projects and approaches based on the product itself. So, I won't go right now in the building part details as it can be an automation process. It can be a customer-facing feature which requires working with the designers and UX. So, there are some general concepts which can be applied to the product building phase. The first one is to try to adopt an agile working model to have a small team that is responsible for the product from end to end. This will give you also the full ownership of the end result. It will minimize bureaucracy and accelerate the decision-making process so that you will also feel empowered to try this forward and being accountable for both the product success or learn from its failures. The single-trade owner should have all resources to deliver, measure and being able to react. The second point to keep in mind when testing with new product launches is to factor in the possibility of failure, which also means that it's not like something didn't work and it ended there. It means that we're collecting learnings for new products and how our future iteration will help us to craft a product working successfully based on the learnings we collected so far. Incremental innovation requires speed to test multiple experiences and find the best performing features to be scaled. Especially when talking about granular gradual innovations, many decisions are reversible. This is called two-way doors decision. An example could be a mobile feature or a UX design. While one-way door decision requires heavily planning and also capital, a capital intense, two-way doors are reversible. They can be quickly made and they can be tested with linear decision-making process. In fact, it's also interesting to know that consumers typically adopt and purchase slightly upgraded products than completely new one religionizing. For example, we can think about the Apple and the iPhone case. Every year, Apple makes small but significant changes to the iPhone in order to improve it. Over the years, innovations can include new cameras, touch ID, a personal assistance and multi-touch interface. Many of these innovations now feel like common but this is because actually Apple led the way and others were to follow. So in a nice nutshell, driving continuous innovation for a product is part of every product manager as we're responsible for the success of the product. We're responsible for the fact that this should bring value to the customers and in the end, it's also a way to extend the product life cycle by bringing value to end users. There are some general rules which can help to keep innovating for your customer, again, not just one offer but constantly. So we can get inspired by putting the customer first, inventing on their behalf, understanding what they're saying, what can easily make their life easier when they're leveraging the product you are managing. We can use also mechanisms to track the progress. So we're building tools or we're launching features which have adoption and we expect the outcome. Finally, we can foster the adoption of a culture that will empower innovation, not just for yourself and the product you're managing but throughout the whole organization. Basically discuss being open to discussing ideas, understand the potential, scaling success and also learning from failures. So understand really how the innovation part can be not just restricted to yourself and your product but something which everyone is responsible for. I hope you enjoyed this session and I hope that this will also help to drive slightly more innovation for the products you're managing. Thank you very much for attending and should have any questions, feel free to reach out to LinkedIn. I'm happy to follow up on this. Thank you very much.