 So if you are a startup, if you are helping build a new product in an enterprise, I think you will enjoy this. I am Gaurav Mathur and I work with Citrix. I manage a really tiny team of product designers in the company and I am, is this eco-hair or is this in the next room? Okay. Yeah. Feel free to tweet during the talk so we can continue this conversation later or connect. So quick question. You know, quick show of hands. How many people here are working on a new product or are helping build a new product? That's awesome. It's about 30% of people here. Amazing. So, you know, when we are building a new product, we always have this nice image of the product in our heads and we never imagine a situation like this. We never imagine that our product could fail or they may never sail out of the dock, right? The ship may never sail out. The reality is that 40 to 90% of the innovative products fail in the market and this percentage varies depending on the category but this is a huge number, right? We are talking of more than 50% up to 90% of new products could fail. About 30,000 new products are introduced, household products are introduced in the market every year in the US, right? About 70 to 90% of them are not there one year after they are introduced. They are pulled out of the shelf, right? They just fail. Now, you may say that, you know, our product is not that typical product. You know, we are, we are innovating, right? We are going to change this industry. Ours is going to be a totally radically different product. It's going to be a new product category, yeah? Like film personality sales, hutke, yeah? So this stat, all of the statistics that you're showing does not apply for us because we are really different. We are going to do something totally different. Guess what? About 50% of first movers or people that, or products that create a new category also fail. It's about 47%, roughly 50% of these kind of products also fail. So what's going on? Right? We are all trying to innovate, about 30 to 40% of the people here are trying to innovate. The cost of innovation failure is huge today, huge, right? It's estimated to be about 100 billion just amongst the Fortune 500 companies. So are we just spinning our wheels? You know, will our ship sink? What's, what's happening? And this is happening with startups, with really small companies, small integrated teams, as well as in large enterprises which have huge number of resources, right? What can we do about this? Companies are so concerned about products today that fail in the market, that take forever to ship. Have you come across situations where the product has been built for the last three years? It hasn't seen the light of the day yet? Yeah, so many, so many. Or products that go over budget. You know, you start, when you start, you say that, oh, it's going to be a small sum of money to build this. You know, at the end of the year, you escalated two or three times. At the end of the second year, it's probably ten times. And it still isn't built. Like building a house. Like building a house, yeah? Yeah, the cost just keeps going up and up. Yeah, it's just, it's huge. So what can we do? You know, what are the common problems? These kind of teams face. They all have good intentions, right? They're all going to, they're all trying to build a new product. They're all working towards it. Some of the common problems are that often goals are not fully understood, right? The scope is very blurry. You don't know where to start, where to end. There are tons and tons of stakeholders, right? Everybody today is talking about customers. That's the key stakeholder. There are so many internal stakeholders, right? Everybody wants to contribute to this awesome product that we're building. Yeah, there are tons of constraints. If you're a startup, you don't have people, right, of money. How do you build a new product? And obviously there is no clear solution. If a clear solution existed, it would have been built. Somebody would have been making money out of it, right? So you're still trying to understand, trying to figure out what to do. And the problem is so severe that Don Norman made a law for it, right? This is in his latest edition of the Design of Everything. And it says that the day the product team is established, it is behind schedule and over its budget. I see a lot of people nodding. So I think we are all in a similar boat here, right? We are all in the same ship. Awesome. So I'm just going to talk about some of the myths and realities that exist while you're building a new product, right? And I've had the good fortune of seeing it from both the perspectives, right? From within a large company, being part of the process as well as from outside being a consultant, a design consultant to many such companies, and having an external perspective. So what are the common misconceptions that exist, right? Any hints, any common things that you see across? What's the needs of a consumer, yeah? Customers may not know what they want. We know what our customer wants. Or we believe that we know what customers want, right? So let's look at some of these things, right? Let's look at what are the common myths. So the first one I call is the idea myth. A really great idea is 90% of the work. Seems to be true, right? If I hit upon that awesome idea, that's it. How many people have heard of this, right? Innovation is 5% inspiration and 95% perspective. Yeah. So what's the reality? The reality is that generating new ideas is not really the hardest part of innovation. We are all creative people. We can all generate ideas, right? So a survey was done and this survey was done amongst 123 large companies and it asked them which part of innovation do you think you're good at? Generating new ideas topped that list, right? Most companies believe that they are extremely good at generating new ideas. Either internally or using consultants. It's not a problem, right? That's why I call it the idea myth. Where is the problem? The problem lies in developing ideas into production services. That's the challenge. Ideas, there are plenty of good ideas. The challenges and implementation of those ideas, right? Most innovation efforts failed during implementation. They start off really well. The idea is awesome. You're heading in the right direction but then you fail at a certain point. Steve Jobs, I'll just read this out. He said there is just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea, it changes and it grows, right? Once you start working on it, you realize the constraints. You have to make a lot of trade-offs, right? You're trying to figure out how to take this forward, how to turn it into a product, how to ship it, how to take it to customers. There are a lot of processes involved. That's where most companies struggle. One methodology that I've found really good at generating ideas and taking it forward is formative generative research and mental model. This is based on Indi Young's mental models book. It's a very simple exercise, right? We all do research. We are experts at research. We are all designers, right? If we don't do good research, we have people who do excellent research in our company. And they generally plot out the mental model. So this diagram lists the mental models on top, right? The mental models of our users on the top. The next row shows it maps it with the features that you're trying to build, right? Right below that are the features that competitors may have. And right below that are the things that you want to do in the future. So this is a snapshot from one of the exercises that we ran for Citrix product, a product that lets you do trainings remotely. And this proved how to be excellent. We've been doing it for a lot of products. And tons and tons of ideas emerge out of this kind of an exercise, right? The next step is how do you validate some of those ideas? How do you start building on them? That's the idea myth, right? The next one I call as the technology myth. This is again, you know, it's a very common myth in technology-driven companies or in startups that originate from a technology-based idea. And it says that, you know, you focus on product development and product design and the product will sell itself, right? I'm sure a lot of people would have heard about this. Just build the product and they'll come, right? Customers will come, you build an awesome product, that's it. What's the reality? Reality is that innovation in the business model is probably as important as the technology and the design. What's business model? What's a business model? So business model suggests that you look at a lot of other things, right? You model them. So you go beyond your product. You start thinking about what are the cost implications, right? What's the value proposition? What are the things that you want to measure, right? Who are your partners who sell this with you? What kind of customers are you trying to sell this to? What are the channels that you'll be selling it in? Is it an online product? Is it an offline product? Is it an enterprise product? What kind of resources do you need to build that? What's your revenue stream? Is it a SaaS product? Then we charge as people use it? Or is it a one-time payment model? So you start thinking about all of these things, right? And you create a business model out of it. So the reality is that stop thinking about your products or services as standalone offerings, right? You need to apply a systems thinking approach here. You need to go beyond the product and the service. You need to look at a lot of these issues. And good designers don't own the business model. You know, it's generally the product managers who own it. But I think designers have a great opportunity to influence the business model, right? Because we know the customers, or we should know the customers, right? And with that knowledge, we have a huge opportunity to be a participant in the development of the business model and to influence it. And the good news is that there are tools that help to do that. Have anybody seen the business model Canvas? So this is an amazing tool that helps you think about a lot of these things. And if your company is not thinking about these, I think it's the responsibility of the designers to raise some of these questions. I like the, personally, I like the lean Canvas model a little better than the business Canvas model or the business Canvas. Simply because it's a little, you know, it uses a little lesser jargon. So to say, it's called the lean Canvas. It's created by a person named Ash Moria. And there are a lot of resources available online, including trainings that you can look at and create this. It's a one-pager business model that you can develop. It has really simple components. The projector is not doing a good job here. So you have problem, you have solution. You know, what are the three problems that you're addressing? What's your solution? What are the top three features that you're going to develop? What's your unique value proposition? Why should somebody buy your product? What's the unfair advantage that you have? What makes your solution difficult to copy? You release it today and tomorrow there will be somebody else doing the same thing. What are the customer segments that you're looking at? What are the key metrics that you're tracking? What are the channels? What is your cost structure? What's your revenue stream? And if you think through this, you know, you have an awesome business model. Some people say that, you know, don't just think about your solution. As designers, as developers, we tend to focus on the solution box. Right? That's what we love doing. We love designing. We love writing code. You know, that's where our focus is all the time. If you forget the solution for a while and start thinking and modeling some of these other parameters, a lot of innovation can happen there. We're working on a product there. It's been a product that has existed for 10 years. But by changing some of the parameters here, we are now launching it for a different customer center. It's a new product. Essentially, the code is the same. The value proposition has changed. The customer segment has changed. So a huge potential for innovation lies here. Focus on the business model and not just the product. Right? So we've looked at the idea of myth and we've looked at the technology myth. The other myth that I want to speak about is the roadmap myth. Right? A lot of people believe that if we have a good roadmap, if I can see one year down the line what I'll be doing, I can build an awesome product. Right? Engineers love this. Right? It has values because I can plan for it. If I know what I'm going to be building eight months down the line, I can hire accordingly. I can allocate resources accordingly. What's the reality? Yeah. For a new product development, I think the reality is that if you're not discovering, I'm altering your course based on your learnings. You're just wasting your time. Yeah. So we need to be learning constantly. We need to be learning from whatever you've built from the customers. Use those learnings to either continue building what you're doing or change course. And with this, it's very hard to have a long-term roadmap. It becomes extremely difficult. Yeah, everybody's familiar with this, right? We start with requirements, design and develop. And this is what we do now by naming it as the waterfall model. I've seen the same thing happening in agile setups. Yeah. We just do it in sprints. That's what changes. So you start to sprint with some requirements. You do design. You develop it. Then you take the next set of requirements. That's not what agile should be, right? Peter Drucker's the management group. You know, he said there is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all. So if you don't know what you want to build, there is no point optimizing the process of building it, right? You can use tons and tons of processes to optimize your engineering and design efforts. But if you don't know what you're building, if you're still figuring out where the value lies, then it's pointless putting our efforts in the optimization phase. I love this diagram because it describes the process of a new product development really nicely, right? There is a discovery phase. We are discovering what the product should be. And that process is very messy. You try something, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, you go back. You experiment again. You build something else. You're still trying to figure out the value. Once you've figured out the value, it's a very straightforward process. That's where optimization can happen. The most important phase is the discover phase. And the discover phase has a lot of uncertainty. You're still generating insights from customers. You're doing a lot of research. You're doing a lot of prototype things. Once you've figured that out, everything is normal and enterprises especially with the second part, they're extremely good with processes. So what is required is a compelling vision, compelling and shared vision that exists within the team, right? The roadmap can be created, but everybody should follow that vision. So we've looked at the idea of the technology with the roadmap myth. The next one I call is the functional teams myth. You would have often seen people saying that independently operating functional teams are extremely efficient. The researchers, they're busy talking to our customers. They don't disturb the engineering teams, right? They're building the product. They work really well when they're focused. The reality is product team that embraces the collaborative model is far more successful. They're a team that is siloed. They create the silos. We like to talk to only designers. Engineers like to talk to only engineers. Product managers talk to product managers. That's not the process that will get you anywhere, especially when you're building a new product. We call this a three in a box model where product managers, product designers and product developers sit together and take decisions together. They also bring in the viability, feasibility and desirability aspects for the product. Together when they create something, the center part of it, that's where awesome customer experience lies. So if you're not talking to the engineers in your company, if you're not talking to the product managers in your company or the researchers in your company, chances are that the product is not going to succeed or you can probably do a better job if you start doing these kind of things. A speaker before me said that there is the discovery phase in the research and then there is a communication phase. I believe that communication should not be a separate phase. These stakeholders should be part of the discovery phase. They should be discovering together. They should be sitting together. They should be sharing insights. Just going beyond that, I think you can extend that team to include product managers, product marketing managers, support people, right? They bring in a lot of good insight. So from that three in a box, a five in a box probably works better. The overheads, the communication overheads go up, but it brings in a much more value. So the next one I want to look at is the data manager, right? Gathering a product using data is awesome. I think the reality is that if that data is not actionable, it's useless. You may be setting on tons and tons of user data that you gather out of your products, but if you can't take decisions based on that data, it's useless. It's a piece of information. Or we generate tons and tons of analytical analytics, right? Everybody uses Google Analytics today. Or another form of usage data. This conference is being sponsored by a company that looks into data, right? Has anybody heard of this term called Net Promoter Squad? So this is an excellent form of gathering some amount of data about customer satisfaction. And it asks one simple question. It asks how likely are you to recommend this product or service to your friends and colleagues? And you have to rate on a scale of 0 to 10, 0 unlikely, and 10 most likely, right? And this is how it looks like. So if you rate from anywhere from 0 to 6, you are called a detractor, which means that you're probably not going to come back to that product or service again. If you rate 7 or 8, you're a passive, right? You don't care, really. But if you rate 9 and 10, you're a promoter. You would probably tell other people about this product. So you can have a net promoter score of 100 or a net promoter score of minus 100. A net promoter score of 50, 60 is pretty awesome. If I just tell you that my product has a net promoter score of 50, what does it tell you? It probably tells you that most customers are satisfied. But it doesn't tell me what should I do to make it better or what am I doing right, which is leading to this amount of customer satisfaction. And when we roll out NPS surveys, there's one more question there. It says, explain the reasons for your reading. And I believe that most useful data comes out of that box, because that's why customers tell you that what they love about your product or what's not working for them. So the reading measure cycle, I think if you're measuring, but if your data is not actionable, it's useless. So we need to derive inspiration from looking at people using our products, right? Product usage data, key performance indicators, KPIs, and applying technology to solve real problems and obviously continuous iteration and improvement. The last one that I want to look at, growth myth. And I believe that we can't help it. You know, it's beyond designers and developers. So the growth myth is companies believe that a new product will drive, let's do, let's innovate as dilemma, right? So companies want to innovate. But they also associate $100 million revenue in the first year of that product. I think products take a while to evolve because they're discovering a new product. Once you're discovering, you're still figuring out where the value lies, who your customers are. The revenue is going to scale slowly initially. It takes time to get a $1 million revenue, a $5 million revenue, $100 million in revenue. It's a slow, it's a very gradual process. And also this gives it, right? I think that executives in a company need to back up innovation for sufficiently long time to see the results. Short-term expectations give innovation very early. So this is all I had, you know. The idea of the technology myth, the roadmap myth, the functional teams myth, the data myth and the growth myth. My question to you is, how will you steer your ship? We're all in the waiting. What decisions are you taking? It's in offline or I'll be there tomorrow so we can continue the collaboration. Thank you.