428: Six strategies that accelerate innovation – with Matt Phillips

How product managers can give their products momentum to get across the finish line

Identifying the strategies that accelerate innovation starts with the question: “What do the world’s best innovation teams do differently?” To find the answer, we are talking with Matt Phillips, who interviewed over 100 new product innovation leaders, identifying six key strategies they use to cut through bureaucracy, find winning ideas sooner, and improve their success rate at launch. 

Matt is the founder of Phillips & Co., a Chicago-based innovation strategy firm. The company’s team of researchers, strategists, and inventors helps organizations reimagine their future and invent new products, services, and brands. Matt has an interesting educational background, with an MBA in Marketing from The Kellogg School of Management. He also graduated from the Conservatory Program in Improvisation at The Second City in Chicago.

Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers

[4:08] After interviewing 100 product and innovation leaders, you identified six key strategies that improve innovation. Can you take us through those?

As a consultant, I’ve seen that the biggest challenge has been projects that grind to a halt or fade away. If you could speed things up, that momentum would get more projects to the finish line.

The six strategies:

[4:46] Question the question.

A company called A. Y. McDonald, which makes plumbing parts for city waterworks, wanted us to help them invent new products. At the kickoff, we asked what their last breakthrough product was. They told us about a valve that came out in the late sixties. If you run a public water system, the last thing you want is a newfangled product—you want the same reliable product over and over. At our first meeting, we suggested we reframe what A. Y. McDonald had hired us to do. Instead of answering, “What new products can we create?” we could answer the basic question, “How do we make more money?” We worked on answering both questions at the same time. Most of the successes were non-product successes around marketing, distribution, and user experience.  Eventually we got to products, but knowing there was an extreme uphill battle, we decided to question the question.

If you’re handed a challenge by the product team, CEO, or customer, first step back and ask, “Is that even the right question to work on?” That accelerates things because often teams spend months or years on a question that many people on the team know isn’t even the right question.

[8:10] Build dream teams.

Walt Mossberg asked Steve Jobs, “How do you turn out such amazing products at Apple?” He said, “Walt, do you know how many committees we have at Apple? Zero.” Apple was organized like a startup. Every product had a team built and dedicated to work on it. After a class I taught at Kellogg, one of the students who had worked at Apple told me an interesting story about the team that ran the software Garage Band, which allows you to record different musical instruments and piece them together into a finished song. The team in charge of Garage Band was four people who happened to play four different instruments, so not only were they great software engineers and leaders, but they were also musicians—a drummer, keyboardist, guitarist, and singer. When one of those four people left Apple, instead of finding a replacement who was just really great at the role they needed filled, they found someone who was great at the role and played the instrument that was missing. There was a synergy in having the four of them not only be software engineers but also be musicians.

Companies that accelerate innovation have thought hard about their teams. They haven’t just cobbled them together. They’ve spent time finding the exact right people.