(2017-09-25) Cagan Customer Inspired Technology Enabled

Martin Cagan: Customer Inspired; Technology Enabled | Silicon Valley Product Group

a) customers don’t know what’s possible; and b) customers don’t know what they want until after they see it.

So then what is the source of true innovation? While there are many, for the clear majority of disruptive innovations that I get the opportunity to witness, the answer is the engineers

I’d like to share a bit of the back stories behind several of the well-known innovations of our time, and how they were inspired and discovered.

Amazon Alexa

started with the relatively humble Echo as a simple, voice-controlled music speaker.

But one of the engineers saw the potential of this technology, and created a prototype where the speaker could serve as the voice controller for a streaming TV device.

Disney MagicBand

Disney invested on the order of $1B in a new digital infrastructure for their theme parks

They built a discovery lab behind Epcot in Orlando

Disney assembled a team of technology thought leaders and asked them to “reinvent the vacation experience, and keep Disney relevant,” which became known as Next-Generation Experience (NGE).

Google Translate

The team made more progress in improving quality of translation in the last year than it had made in the entire decade prior.

new, enabling technology

Apple iPhone

when the iPhone was being designed, the smartphone leaders of the day – Blackberry, Palm, Nokia, Motorola – these companies were all hard at work on their next smartphone, but instead of using their engineers the way I’m describing, they were busy conducting focus groups.

Keys to Leveraging Strong Engineers

table stakes for a strong technology product company is to hire strong engineers that are passionate about your vision

Here are my six keys to leveraging strong engineers:

1. Provide engineers business context

2. Connect engineers with customer pain

3. Understand constraints vs. requirements

4. Give engineers time in discovery

Giving engineers some time in discovery is easily one of the best ROI things you can do. Most experienced engineers will tell you that a few hours including them up front can save weeks and month of waste later in the cycle.

5. Measure product team as a whole

single set of shared OKRs

6. Competent and confident product managers

not all engineers are interested in engaging at the level I’m describing

you do need at least one engineer on every product team that is willing and able to engage at this level