Luke Hohmann was recommended by the VP of Global Innovation of the RELX Group, Jeff Honious, who was my guest in episode 28. Consequently, I knew I had to interview Luke to learn about his tools for innovators. Luke is the founder and CEO of The Innovation Games, which is now known as Conteneo. His past experiences include computer scientist, engineer, and product manager. Luke is serious about the smart application of games to optimize decision making in innovation, product development, and market research, and numerous companies use his tools. He is also the author of “Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play.” My favorite line from his profile is: “Luke’s an old school Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Instead of building a company to flip, he’s building a company to change the world.”
Practices and Ideas for Product Managers, Developers, and Innovators
* Luke’s background is in competitive figure skating, computer science, and engineering. Couple that with curiosity and a never ceasing desire to learn and you have the roots of his interest in innovation.
* He credits a manager at EDS, Vern Olson, for starting him on a path to innovation. Vern told him that if he worked hard he’d be able to do really cool things and EDS would support him. This stimulated his curiosity to explore new things and earned him a reputation for innovation.
* The lesson learned – Organizational leadership can create an environment that fosters innovation or stifles it.
* Luke did not set out to create games for innovation but started as a product manager asking how to best understand what people are looking for. He used paper and pencil prototypes and through experience realized that he got better insights when his customer was holding the pencil and completing the prototype herself.
* Luke later discovered the application of games. They respond to humans’ natural desire to play and collaborate. From a game theory perspective, games have a goal; a set of rules, resources, constraints, and interaction models; a feedback mechanism to tell you how you’re doing; and natural appeal that engages people.
* The meta goal of an innovation game is to solve a business problem.
* Buy A Feature is an example of an innovation game. It helps the group decide which projects are most important and makes the best use of their available resources. To use it, say you have:
* 20 possible projects and the total budget for all them is $20M
* But you only have $8M available for new projects
* Instead of creating a competitive environment for selecting the projects, you create a collaborative environment.
* This could be accomplished by telling eight decision-makers that they each have $1M to allocate to projects.
* They must work together to determine the projects of highest value.
* Buy A Feature is used in the non-profit Every Voice Engaged to help cities create budgets and decrease the influence of political positions.
* Bwin.party, a large digital entertainment company, used Buy A Feature not only to select strategic projects but also develop alignment between senior leaders and managers.
* Some organizations try to use surveys to make decisions. Luke says “surveys suck.” Surveys can tell you what an answer is, but they don’t tell you the deeper meaning behind information. Collaboration does, which is the purpose of innovation games.
* To find the right innovation game for the right problem, Luke’s company, Conteneo, has created a game finding tool. See more at Conteneo.
Useful links:
* Luke’s innovation game company
Chad McAllister, PhD - Helping Product Managers become Product Masters
clean
44:02
TEI 036: Product Development Lessons for New and Experienced Software Product Managers – with Senior VP Jeremy Dillingham
https://productinnovationeducators.com/blog/tei-036-product-development-lessons-for-new-and-experienced-software-product-managers-with-senior-vp-jeremy-dillingham/
Mon, 07 Sep 2015 11:55:00 +0000
https://www.productinnovationeducators.com/blog/?p=3572
Jeremy Dillingham has a long list of skills and experiences as a seasoned product manager, including leading teams, roadmap planning, portfolio management, Lean Startup, Customer Discovery, Agile Development, and SaaS architectures. He is a mentor at Techstars, an accelerator for technology startups. He currently serves as a Senior VP at Return Path, a company that […]
Jeremy Dillingham has a long list of skills and experiences as a seasoned product manager, including leading teams, roadmap planning, portfolio management, Lean Startup, Customer Discovery, Agile Development, and SaaS architectures.
Jeremy Dillingham has a long list of skills and experiences as a seasoned product manager, including leading teams, roadmap planning, portfolio management, Lean Startup, Customer Discovery, Agile Development, and SaaS architectures. He is a mentor at Techstars, an accelerator for technology startups. He currently serves as a Senior VP at Return Path, a company that helps organizations promote and protect their brands.
Practices and Ideas for Product Managers, Developers, and Innovators
* Jeremy moved from project management into product management, one of many paths that works well. Project management provided the skills to manage a team, create a plan for delivering results, and more.
* Product management has a larger purview than project management and requires working across the organization, such as with user experience, sales, marketing, manufacturing, etc.
* Product managers benefit from having business acumen and understanding business concepts, such as the role of strategy, vision, business models, etc.
* Jeremy joined a company, Return Path, during a period where scaling the business was the focus. The company did not have experience with new product development or innovation. Jeremy’s experience as a product manager allowed him to lead innovation efforts. A new product was required to respond to a strong competitor.
* An example of an unsuccessful product resulted from not focusing on a single coherent market but instead sold the product to 10 very different customers. Instead of focusing first on a single vertical/industry and building a successful sales process for that vertical, their efforts were diluted across industries and it became a Frankenstein product. The situation is addressed in Jeffrey Moore’s book “Crossing the Chasm.”
* An example of a successful product and one learned from the previous situation, focused on a single vertical, validating a market need, using a Lean approach with MVPs, and quickly closing sales and building revenue. By first focusing on a single vertical, you learn the needs of that niche and can best build a product that specifically solves its problems. Once you dominate one niche you can use that to springboard to another.
* Some favorite tools:
* Discovery – the process of talking with customers and validating what you are learning about the problems and needs. This involves writing a script of interview questions, prioritizing the questions, talking with customers to gain responses, and analyzing the data. Discovery sessions with customers should be done by two interviewers so one can focus on asking questions and the other can focus on taking notes.
* Experiment – one pass through the build-measure-learn loop (per Lean).
* Metrics – dashboards, KPIs, another important indicators.
* Lean Canvas – see TEI 010 episode with the creator of the Lean Canvas.
Useful links:
* Jeremy works for Return Path
* Connect with Jeremy on LinkedIn
* Recommended books
* Running Lean by Ash Maurya
* Escape Velocity by Geoffrey Moore
* Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore
* Inspired by Marty Cagan
Innovation Quotes
“Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers.
