7 ways to generate ideas for new product (ProductCamp Boston 2016)

John O’Brien

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I’m a Director of Product Management at Wolters Kluwer, a large information services firm, focused on creating products to help people who work in insurance compliance.

I’ve been doing product stuff for about eight years.

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You wake up every day and try to thing of new features for your products that will really make a dent in your market.

What tools can help you generate new ideas?

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Analysis of your products strengths and weaknesses versus competitors and substitutes.

In-depth knowledge of your customers problems and have a sense of your decision makers criteria for making a purchasing decision.

SWOT analysis of your product’s position in the market.

A workflow analysis of what customers before and after they user your product.

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In honor of us being in the Microsoft NERD center, I choose Excel the example product.

“Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet developed by Microsoft for Windows,Mac OS X, and iOS. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and amacro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications. It has been a very widely applied spreadsheet for these platforms, especially since version 5 in 1993, and it has replaced Lotus 1-2-3 as the industry standard for spreadsheets. Excel forms part of Microsoft Office.”

- Wikipedia

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Ease of Use Collaboration Graphing Statistics Price

Excel (with

Office365)

Google Sheets

Think-Cell

SPSS

This is only a partial list. See a full list of spreadsheet software on wikipedia.

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This is only an example competitor analysis for Excel. If I was really the Excel PM,

this would probably be much bigger.

Strengths

•Dominant market share (750 million users worldwide)

•Tightly integrated with the dominant office software suite (Microsof Office) and the dominant desktop operatin system (Microsoft Windows)

Opportunities

•Continued cultural emphasis on predictive analytics and data analysis may represent an opportunity for increased overall adoption

Threats

•TCO of new online spreadsheets (Google Docs, Zoho) and open source alternatives (Libre Office) may be less expensive

Weaknesses

•Expensive versus free competitors

•Limited charting capabilities for some uses

•Limited statistical analysis capabilities versus some substitutes (SPSS, R)

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The feature ideas for Excel may or may not be good ideas; the point of the examples is to demonstrate how to use the 7 suggested approaches to generate ideas for new product features.

Whether they are good ideas or not would be determined through the market validation process used by your organization to make a GO/NO GO decision on new features

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If you sell the users flour to make cupcakes, start selling cupcakes

Example feature for Excel: Improve Mail Merge integration

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Serve the current use cases better than you serve them now

Example for Excel: Better handling of large files, better graphics, more Tufte-esque graphing options

A LOT of this has already been done for Excel

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Integrate with other tools or solutions that your firm sells and/or that exist in the users environment.

Example feature for Excel: Two way integration with SPSS

Again, a LOT of this has already been done for Excel, particularly with Office.

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Add a feature that is intended to increase the product appeal to a new potential customer or a new customer group within existing customers

Example feature for Excel: Add support Logistic Regression, built-in formulas for Bayesian Inference, etc. to go after statistical modeling users.

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Evaluate an idea that worked in a different market and ask whether the same idea, when adapted to your product, would be a good ideaExample for Excel: Ad supported content works for email (see Gmail). Create a stripped-down version of Office 365 Excel online supported by ad revenue.

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Take a recent innovation and ask what constraints you previously operated under which are relaxed by the new technology

Example for Excel: New tools to work with big data are available. Create UI abstractions of those tools be utilized via Excel to provide new cloud-computing-like capabilities for desktop users

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Double-down on an area where your competitor analysis has indicated both that customers would find the new feature appealing, and competitors and substitutes for your solution are weaker than where your product currently is

Example for Excel: In our competitor analysis, most other products are weak on ease-of-use. Double down on Ease of Use via exploratory interviews, new interface paradigms for tablets, etc.

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1. Move Upstream or Downstream of Current Product Use

2. More, Faster, Better

3. Bundle and Integrate

4. New Features for New Markets

5. Could That Work in My Market?

6. Productize a Technology Change

7. Be Strong Where They are Weak

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Questions?

If I didn’t get a chance to answer your question(s), feel free to email me: [email protected]

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