Product discovery process:

We all know innovation is a buzz word and every company big or small is looking to innovate in order to either gain a larger pie in the existing market or create a new market altogether.
We often see that brilliant ideas fail to generate value for the organisation and to its customers. It would have been great if we have a product discovery playbook to refer to?

I feel innovation in big, established firms is done a bit differently than in Startups. Here, I am presenting a product discovery flow around how we can improve an existing product offering in a well-established company.

Beware of Law of Averages:

Recently a few users contacted me and complained about the performance of one of our Enterprise application. According to them, it took them more than 10 seconds to log in to the system. I couldn’t relate to it and my first action was to open up monthly MI report sent to me a day earlier by one of my SRE leads. While going through performance metrics, I saw a graph showing average response time of 0.2 seconds. So where was the problem?

Problem with averages:

While dealing with averages we tend to ignore underlined data distribution. When a single spike or anomaly has no impact on the dataset the concept is acceptable but when extreme cases dominate, we should discount the term average.

There is a great example given by Rolf Dobelli in his book “The Art of thinking clearly”, there are 50 passengers travelling on a bus and their average income is $50,000 per year. At the next stop, one of the passengers deboards and on gets Bill Gates (with his annual fortune of $5 Billion). Can we say that the new average wealth of the bus has shot up by $1 million? Will it be the true picture? A single outlier has radically altered the picture, rendering the term ‘average’ completely meaningless.

So in the data-driven world, we have to be careful with averages.

Product Market fit:

We are a Diaper Brand with Premium Japanese Quality
– Mamy Poko Pants Diaper

When MamyPoko pants entered the Indian consumer market, it was already dominated by big players like Pampers, Huggies etc. But MamyPoko pants came with a unique value proposition and penetrated this customer segment with its disruptive innovation strategy.

Unicharm, the maker of the Mamy Poko pants, enjoys a healthy market share of 36% in the Rs 4,700 crore Indian diaper market.

I was curious about the value proposition of Mamy Poko pants and hence came up with a canvas which might have used by its product people at the time of ideation.

Looking forward to the feedback.

And finally, thought of the day:

Product execution gives your salary, while innovation gives your pension.