Product Management Fast Track: PMFT Digest 15 - Innovation as a Numbers Game

PMFT Digest 15 - Innovation as a Numbers Game

2014 Jul 14, by David Kim

rss

PM Reading Digest - A Game

Your weekly product management reading. Not too much, not too little, just right.

Tonight PM Fast Track hosted Lewis Lin to speak about How to Get a Job as a Product Manager. Lewis is the best-selling author of PM interview prep book Decode and Conquer.

At one point, Lewis asked the audience to pair off and raised this challenge:

Come up with 20 ways to employ your pet in 2 minutes!

Lewis Lin leading PMFT meetup

As you might imagine, pairs came up with all sorts of whacky ideas. The room filled with noise and laughter; it was hard to generate 20 ideas (ideas power distribuion - most are expected, few are out there on the long-tail).

Some complained that the exercise was too broad (a good PM should know how to build constraints and deadlines), while others talked about the difficulty of relating to having a pet (a good product manager must have empathy).

The exercise was followed by observations on the nature of innovation.

First, good ideas are difficult to know a priori, and therefore an important process to innovation is simply generating many of them. Play the numbers game.
Second, ideas tend to generate new ideas. For example, once you generate the idea “Hire my dog to fetch golf balls,” it become easy to say “hire my dog to fetch tennis balls,” and for that to evolve to “hire my dog as a tennis trainer.”

Homework

There are other gems of wisdom to be derived here, but let me challenge you to perform a similar exercise with your team. If you are looking for fun ways to break through a roadblock, or to build team rapport, try this or a similar exercise a try. See what you learn.

If you buy the hypothesis of (product) innovation as a numbers game, do you have the right systems and metrics in place to deliver results?

Upcoming Events

Silicon Valley and SF

July 16: July Startup Bike Ride with Asana hosted by Asana.
July 22: Product Management Networking at Yammer by Web and Mobile product managers. Great networking opportunity.
July 22: Thinking Fast and Slow by PM Book Club.
July 24: Hooked: A Workshop on Building Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal.

Back to All Blogs

comments powered by Disqus

Stay connected via our newsletter:

Or follow via

Read recent posts

Get involved

Submit meetup ideas
Want to teach?

Donating = Caring

If you find any value and encouragement in the PMFT Digest, please consider becoming a Supporter with a small recurring or one-time donation of your choosing, between a cup of coffee and a mission taco.