Innovation platform.

Zoom on a 2-year project to build an innovation management system.

The brief.

The global innovation team implemented a new global innovation process within the company.

They needed a product manager to lead an agile team to build a system that helps global innovation teams manage their projects, collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders, and ask for approvals from the leadership team.

The process.

I applied product management best practices to lead the project team to success in record time.

Overview of my process to lead the project:

Innovation Platform - Overview of my process to lead the project.svg

The story.

#1 Design thinking: understanding users.

I started by talking to users from different countries regularly to understand their pain points and working methods. I set the team’s goal to one conversation with a user per week, and we ended up talking to one user a day for some weeks.

I just needed to give the users the floor to heard them talk about their challenges. I clustered those challenges into main user discovery areas and riskiest assumptions. I created a learning plan as the central element of the product roadmap.

I tested ideas through 1-week prototypes and no-code websites. More than just feedback, seeing how people react to our screens has been an incredible source of valuable information. This approach enables me to intelligently prioritize features and focus the team’s efforts on what provided the most value to users.

Focus: my process for creating personas.

I innovate by starting with the customer and working backward. Personas are an excellent way to summarize and share a my understanding and findings of users and avoid self-referential design.

My process for creating personas:

Innovation Platform - My process for creating personas.svg

#2 Lean startup: launching a quick and dirty minimum product.

I coached the team to do their best to launch the product very early, just after three months of development, even though it was incomplete and full of bugs.

If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late. — Reid Hoffman

Well, I was pretty embarrassed. Especially since the concepts of “test & learn” and “quick & dirty” were relatively new to the users.

But, with a product users’ hands, the conversations were much insightful than when I asked questions about prototypes. This approach allowed me to understand their challenges even more nuanced and make the roadmap more reliable to help them tackle their challenges.

Focus: my process for running lean experiments.

I use lean experiments as an efficient way to jump into the future, collect insights, then come back to the present to build the most relevant features while saving resources and time.

My process for running lean experiments:

Innovation Platform - My process for running lean experiments.svg

Tools I use to build 1-week prototypes and products:

  • Umso to quickly test a value proposition through a landing page and check its relevance with users;

  • Bubble to create advanced responsive web applications with complex workflows;

  • Webflow to create animated responsive landing pages, rich content pages, and e-commerce websites;

  • Glide to quickly convert a database into a mobile app to test a mobile product concept;

  • Figma to design and collaborate on high-fidelity prototypes and quickly take user feedback into account;

  • Miro to build low-fidelity prototypes in real-time with users during co-design workshops;

  • UserTesting to conduct remote unmoderated user testing and collect insights to improve the products;

  • Feedback Loop to collect and structure customer feedback and share insights with the team.

#3 Agile & scale: from early adopters to global employees

Once I identified the product-market fit, I went from a startup mode to an industrial method to ensure the product scale-up within the group.

I defined and set north star metrics for the team to measure engagement, adoption, retention, and users’ satisfaction.

I coached the agile team to be perfectly autonomous to complete delivery and discovery tasks following product management best practices.

Finally, I determined and conducted more global transformation and acculturation actions with the change management team, including creating and animating a community of power users motivated to share feedback, relay news, and participate in our co-design workshops.

Focus: my process and tools for creating a product roadmap.

I use a product roadmap as an effective way to align vision, communicate what the team is building, get leadership buy-in, and collect feedback.

My process and tools for creating a product roadmap:

Innovation Platform - My process and tools for creating a product roadmap.svg
  • A high-level roadmap gives the execs a 12-month inspiring overview of the product vision, goals, and capabilities;

  • A dev. roadmap breaks down the product goals into 2-week sprint goals with feature prioritization for the next three months;

  • A roadmap shared with users on an online tool gives them visibility on the work in progress and asks for their feedback.

Tools I use to build and run a product roadmap: Notion, Trello, Jira, Asana, monday.com, ProductBoard.

Top 3 takeaways.

  1. The insights collected when putting a prototype in front of the users’ eyes are valuable; Those when putting a ready-to-use product in their hands are even better;

  2. Quickly delivering a product, even incomplete, is a way to ensure its quality, as it enables to rectify the roadmap and direct efforts in the right direction;

  3. Users love unfinished products; It’s the Ikea effect. Co-building a product or solution makes the users feel competent and proud of what they’ve created. It’s a decisive advantage in favor of the community-led product co-design.

Try working with me.

Book a 1-hour free remote workshop to co-design an innovation experiment plan.

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