Separating Breakthroughs from Distractions

Do you ever wonder why some innovations change the world and others just fade into obscurity? Well, today we're going to examine the art of distinguishing groundbreaking ideas from mere distractions, all in service of moving your business forward. Welcome to the Orchestration Podcast, a podcast from a radio by RRD on how modern marketing gets done. I'm Matthew Tilly and I'm your guide on this journey. Today my guest is Paul Mandible, the chief product officer for a radio by RRD. Now this is the second time I've had him on the show, but he is a seasoned expert in product management and innovation strategy. So I just had to have him come back and talk about this subject of separating hype from reality when it comes to innovation. So without any further ado, let's get into it with Paul Mandible. We're going to be talking about innovation and really assessing and accessing innovation. So I think the way I'd like to start the conversation is just to give you the floor to talk about distinguishing between what is a promising innovation and then there's always stuff that says it's innovation, but it's really just a shiny distraction. So how do you distinguish between those? I know you've probably lived through a few cycles on that. So what's the magic there to distinguish with them? It is very easy to get caught into the shiny new syndrome. Product is not immune to that. I think every business suffers it to some degree. The biggest thing that you have to do is you have to balance market noise with what your clients are saying. So any business that is contemplating any innovation, you're usually not planning on taking that innovation and selling it to a brand new audience. People that you've never talked to before. Whether you're B2B or B2C, it doesn't matter what product it is. Most things that you plan on innovating are I'm going to build a new feature that does X, Y and Z. I'm going to launch a new product that does A, B and C. And you're going to take it to your marketplace first and talk to your clients about it. And the very first thing that you should do to try to separate fact from fiction, hype from reality, bird in the hand versus three in the bush is describe the innovation and ask your clients what they think about it. Is this something that you would buy? If it was available now, would you buy it now? Would you buy it in three months, six months, 12 months? Is it something that you're just thinking about, but you're not planning on making an investment here? And especially if you're in product management or in marketing and you're representing clients, your products to the marketplace, stakeholder feedback is your number one job. Your first stakeholders are your clients. And figuring out whether you should get caught up in the hype really begins with one, do I have access to my clients? If you don't have the infrastructure in place to go quickly and informally survey your clients. If you don't have relationships with them to get responses back without begging, you need to build that infrastructure because it's your first defense about making a bunch of really poor investments with your resources. Your clients aren't the only source of truth though, but those questions are really smart ones to ask, right? Imagine that it existed right now. Would you buy it? When would you buy it? And that tells you an awful lot about the state of the people who might be opening up pocket looks for your innovation right now. That's really different than what might be happening in the marketplace. The second thing that you need to do though is you really do need to go do market research, like exhaustive market research. You need to understand trends. You should be following a number of analysts, a number of researchers and thinkers, both big and small. Again, leading minds aren't always at the biggest analyst firms. Sometimes they're buried in pockets and podcasts and think tanks that you just have to curate as you develop expertise in a particular area of potential product innovation. And the good news is that there's so many research tools out there now, both paid and free. The first order of business is just to combine what would my clients do with what's happening in the market? Can you use both of those things together to develop your first wave of perspective on what might be? Yeah. Now, I alluded to the fact that I'm sure you have seen some of this stuff come and go. So can you talk about some of the successful or maybe unsuccessful sniff outs that you've done on some of the trends that seem like a big deal at the time that maybe weren't worth the hype and maybe talk a little bit about what tipped you off to it wasn't worth investing in. I'll give you one of each, right? So we entered the paid social advertising business about three years ago. One could argue that we were late to market a little bit because the market trend was very real. But one could also argue that the majority of our clients were print clients. They were getting into digital for the first time. Digital advertising was new to them, the entire ecosystem, retail media networks were just forming and it was a big distraction. People were trying to figure out the entire ecosystem and where they fit into it. And then the rise of social media platforms led to the rise of paid social, but it seemed like a scary world to people who were maybe slightly behind the curve of technical adoption. But when we did the research, obviously the market was there. The platforms were growing, usership and viewership and advertising dollars were flowing. Market evidence was really easy to get our hands on. And then when we went and talked to all of our clients, both print and digital and you asked them questions, do you plan on advertising on Facebook, on TikTok when it came up, on meta, on Pinterest? The answer was either yes, we plan on doing it in the next six to 12 months or we're not doing it right now, but I would really like to or we're doing it right now. We don't really know what we're doing and we need a whole bunch of help. So we entered that market. We put that product, that service offering into the incubation zone and three years later. That's a success and sort of a slam doc. I'm sure the listeners will be like, congratulations, you discovered gravity. But that sometimes it can be that simple, right? So one on the other side that I remember is the metaverse. So just similar time frame, more like two years ago, maybe two plus years ago, the hype around the metaverse was real. It was everywhere. Everyone was freaking out about the next wave of advertising is going to occur in these virtual worlds. And it'll be the first to admit that I definitely paid attention to the hype. Like I got caught up in learning about it. I may or may not own a small section of real estate on earth to where the Kentucky Derby is right. So I hear it. I hear it. I'm definitely out there, right? Sure, sure. The difference is that when we went and talked to our clients about it, they were just confused and had so many questions like, you know, really basic questions like, you know, do I really need to set up a Roblox storefront? I don't know how to create an experience in the virtual world. Like, what are these things and how would my advertising appear? Who else is doing it? Show me examples of things. And there was just this really, really wide gap between the hype of the metaverse and all of the investor dollars that were going into it and the rate of advertising in the metaverse and the number of clients that we could put our hands on that were actually saying they were going to allocate dollars there. And what our clients were really asking was, well, what do you think is going to happen? Yeah. Like rather than giving me a product, can you give me a thought piece on where you think this whole world is going? Is this something that I should do at all? And that's a really different ask than how do I do it ask? So instead of investing in the metaverse, and I was unpopular for this decision at the time, we partnered with a research firm, co-wrote a thought piece on the future of the metaverse for CPG and retail and Grocer. And we held off on making a big product investment and it turned out to be the right call. I think a lot of companies lost a lot of money investing early in that space and just got caught up in it. It's easy to do. Right. What you just described is your life as your chief product officer for this company and you're assessing these technologies about what we can then, what services we can provide to brands who are doing their marketing. Can you help bridge the gap between you're thinking on that for this business and how some of our clients might need to think about these same technologies, influencer marketing, metaverse or whatever else is the next big thing that might come down the pike. Can you maybe help them think through a framework of deciding to test, innovate, toss, whatever that may look like? Can you help them think through that? Yeah, there are some universal frameworks that apply to all businesses. Jeffrey Moore, the author who wrote Crossing the Casm, he more recently wrote a book called zone to win. And in that book, he tries to break the world up into four big quadrants that are roughly, is your product or business a startup, a turnaround, a performance driven business, or is it something else? The first 90 days by Harvard Business Review going back 20 years, talked about four different zones for businesses, right? Roughly breaking up again into, are you incubating, are you turning around, are you in the performance zone, right? So, so when you think about your product portfolio, you really have to come up with your own framework, right? There are some universal truths like everybody should have something akin to a startup or an incubation zone where you know you're going to take one or two big bets, you're still in guessing mode, you're in startup mode, you're breaking rules, and you're taking a shot at something, but but it's not everything because you only get to make one or two big bets every couple of years in most industries, right? Yes, yes. And then you have to decide what are the other zones look like for my product portfolio? Your performance zone tends to be where you know 90% of your revenues and 99% of your profits come from these are your bread and butter products that are making money paying the bills like you don't want to mess around with those. Your turn around or transition zone are things that maybe used to be performance or are failed startups coming out of the incubation zone and you need to reinvent them, right? Your sustaining success are things that have made it out of the incubation zone and are now scaling and starting to grow and could someday be your new performance zone benchmarks, right? So these four terms are just four rough terms, right? There are a number of different textbooks and portfolio management blogs and articles that you can read and I would encourage every brand to take something cookie cutter, adapt it to your own. They're all sort of roughly the same, but make the rules of each zone specific to your business. That's sort of step number one. And then step number two is then really define the activities and the behaviors that you're going to be able to deliver in each zone. So in the incubation zone, for example, like you have to break rules, right? You you won't get off the dime if you don't because you're saying something like, okay, we're going to we're going to launch a new innovation in product marketing and I'm going to start using I'll go back to the metaverse, right? We're going to start we're going to start advertising our shoes on the metaverse and there's going to be little Minecraft and Roblox characters running around with our logo shoes, right? When you make that decision, you have to say I'm giving this idea X number of years to reach Y amount of revenue and it has to be material, right? So in Jeffrey Moist book, he says, you know, three years to reach 10% of revenues, it doesn't have to be hard and fast like that. But whatever your business is, you have to say, sure, sustaining life for this innovation has to look like this for me to continue investing in it. And block by block or quadrant by quadrant establishing those rules is is everything and communicating them throughout the enterprise. It's everything. And it's it's the first step. And one of the things I'm hearing pretty clear from you is it's not a don't look at innovation or absolutely do. It's sort of this ballot portfolio, I think is the word you use sort of balanced portfolio approach. You put a put the right number of chips in that basket and work with it. So there is this concept of structuring experiments for some emerging things that you don't know how they're going to turn out. That's what you're alluding to it sounds like. So how could you, you know, and particularly let's be let's be plain faced about how could a radio working alongside of some of these clients help them structure some experiments to actually figure out if this is something they want to invest their ad money into or their marketing technology focus on. The first thing in moving quickly, right, you sort of set up your zones, you know, your portfolio sort of lives made a couple big bets. If you focus on just the incubation zone in your question, you've got to get to prototype as fast as possible. Okay. And in prototype usually involves some amount of design, some amount of copy, the technology infrastructure to test whatever your prototype entails. You might be trying to stand up, I don't know, product landing pages that have a certain content experience, right? Right. You want to be able to test that concept. Well, you don't just describe that to the clients you might be selling to you, you very rapidly stand up a prototype and take the concept out to market as you're going through the discovery phase. You get through that hurdle and now you're into test and learn. Well, test and learn is primarily a deployment and data gathering exercise. So a radio and the tools that we have under our belt allow us to work with you to very quickly fill the gaps that you have with either content development, web development, offer development and then rapidly get something out to prototype. And then we've built a really robust data infrastructure so that as we're building the tests and experiments, where they're lockstep with you collecting all of the data. And then obviously we have both research and customer experience design specialists on staff that help do both a qualitative and quantitative assessment of whether your idea is working and whether you should continue testing and innovating and tweaking and getting to the next iteration. Now I'm imagining that a lot of the folks that were listening to this are probably not going this whole process alone. They may have some, there's obviously some leader inside of the marketing department that's probably leading this charge, but they're likely working with vendors with agencies with other providers. I think the other conversation that you and I were involved with with Kevin recently, we kind of pointed out that there's a lot of promises that are in the marketplace. So as someone is trying to work with a vendor, work with a maybe an agency to help them navigate through this innovation assessment, how do they evaluate those offerings, those promises that are being given to them? Maybe some questions they should be asking some ways to validate the claim, some way to understand, hey, this is somebody that can really help guide me and shepherd me through this process. So the folks that might be proposing working with you, they should be coming to the table with tried and true frameworks themselves. So if you ask the question, you know, I'm trying to evaluate my product portfolio, what framework do you recommend I use to evaluate that portfolio and they're giving you blank stairs or the answer is, you know, we'll develop one from scratch with you and you're starting from ground zero, I would say that that's a red flag. Companies that have done this before have frameworks and templates and tools and techniques like ready off the shelf and they're available and describable, even demonstrable. The second thing that I would ask very much is show me a case study of an example where you've taken a product all the way from life cycle inception to sunset and what that looks like. Give me a good story and a bad story and then explain to me what the toll gates were that got you from phase one all the way to the end or from phase one to phase three before you pulled the plug and what were the metrics that helped you make that decision. I also think it's important to to work with vendors that have a perfectly balanced blend of skills, technical, commercial and strategic. So you have to be balancing out those three skills all the time when you're working with anybody that's trying to help you assess your product portfolio. Because it's not it's not just one skill that's going to cut it and you don't have to have all of those three skills in equal balance in every single person that you talk to. They should be deliberately bringing people to the table and working with you and as ideas and testing methodologies are coming to be a business person should be able to propose something and you should hear a technical person chime in and say that's a great idea, except what you've just said is technically impossible. So it's not going to work. Right. So in vice versa, right? Like you should be looking for a blend of those things, which we very much try to bring to the table with a radio in our strategic services group. Like we are deliberately trying to find both truth sayers and naysayers and optimists at all different levels of those three skills bring to the table when we're working with our clients to evaluate strategies. A lot of what we've talked about to this point has been, you know, scientific might be overstating it, but it's very much, you know, systems and processes and that sort of thing. How much of this evaluating and moving forward with innovation can be encouraged help by the culture. So they sort of the human side of it, if you will, whether that's the culture of the organization that's doing the innovation or maybe a partner as you were just talking about some agency or some vendor that you're working with. So how do these decisions and discussions get influenced by or have an influence on the people side, the culture side of innovation within an organization? So it's a huge part of the equation. It is both an influencer and an influence. Okay. So stories are often like the best way to explain it. I think the classic one that people run into is large enterprise, mature organization, a lot of products in what I would call the performance zone, bread and butter, everything's making money. Nothing's broken if it's not broken, don't fix it. And a resistance to incubate, because incubate means you're going to break rules and you're going to embrace breaking rules. The very same people that are managing the performance zone, bread and butter making money have to embrace the characteristics of incubation and be supported by the organization, which sometimes is an awkward fit. So culturally, the organization has to say, we are embracing innovation and our tolerance to do that is definable. And our tolerance is going to allow these sets of behaviors to unfold when we declare that this team is incubating. Right? Like that's sort of a classic conflict, especially in large enterprise organizations where the accusation of some of them is that enterprises is where innovation goes to die. It doesn't have to be that way if you embrace the incubation zone. But there's also other symptoms that are true. Like a lot of organizations get stuck because they reward crisis management and problem solving behavior versus the behavior that results in a balanced portfolio, not just of innovation but of growth. So if firefighting is a skill that is both handy to have but also extremely valued in most organizations, then people aspire to fight fires, which is different than aspiring to build a balanced portfolio of hydro products and innovations and even products that are in the performance zone that have an unlimited ceiling. So I find that doing portfolio management is a healthy exercise because it forces the organization to look at itself in the mirror and decide what it thinks about the basket of things that it sells. And so I'll tell one more story at the risk of sort of running long. - Yeah, I'll start on this exercise with clients. Well, let's just say that you have 20 products and you run the exercise of interviewing all stakeholders and you've defined the four quadrants and you ask all the stakeholders independently, tell me where you think product X lives in these four quadrants. I guarantee you that in every organization, you'll get one product that someone says lives in the performance zone, but their colleague says it lives in the transformation zone and their other colleague says it lives in the incubation zone and that's a sign of organizational dysfunction. Like that's the beginning of the cultural change 'cause only then can you say, okay, you don't, you don't actually think about the quadrants the same way, which is why you're not really driving the right behaviors and culture is sort of an assembly of behaviors shared by a team. So it does start from there. - Last question for you is just to put you back in, make sure that you're in that solidly in that guru seat to advise the people listening. Give some practical advice to that marketing leader who is overwhelmed by the choices, the options, the available technologies, they want to move their business forward, they want to be that innovator, they want to do the next big thing, but they need some kind of a filter strategy. So give them three or four things they can do kind of right now as they're evaluating the world around them. - So I'll offer two pieces of advice. Number of times, if you don't use it already, just find on the internet and start using Ash Nakamir as lean canvas for new idea intake. It is the fastest way to give anyone that has a product idea whether they're on your team or not, a canvas and a format for them to represent that idea and pitch it in a very quick way. - Nice. - It was actually originally developed as a way to streamline the way that investors got pitched new ideas. So investors were tired of sort of getting 30 page decks that they couldn't make out their tails of and they wanted to do a slide, broken up into nine quadrants that gave them everything that they needed to know about a new idea that would facilitate a dialogue, which is my part one A and one B. So one A is embrace the lean canvas and one B is embrace the conversation that it starts and use that as your intake process. And then second bit of advice is there are so many tools out there right now that allow rapid prototyping of new concepts, especially if your product or idea involves anything web related, just embrace every possible rapid prototyping tool that's out there to test new concepts, new creatives, new ideas, like it's incredible how quickly you can go from zero to 60 if innovation is your focus area and you're trying to separate the good ideas from the bad ideas. If they all get a prototype, it gets a lot easier. - That was amazing. Thank you Paul, great advice to end on, but also really, really good, just practical breaking down of a pretty complicated topic. So thanks so much. Hi there, Matthew Tilly here one more time to give you three big takeaways from this conversation. The first is always balance the noise of the marketplace with feedback from your buying audience. Before you jump in on that latest trend, ask your customers, is this really something you want to do? Will you buy it? Will you use it? Will you interact with it? Their insights may be your first line of defense against making a poor investment. Second, embrace rapid prototyping. There are a ton of tools available to quickly test new ideas, new concepts, and done correctly, not only can it be an important way to separate good ideas from bad ones, but either way, it gives you great data to help you innovate more effectively and more efficiently. Lastly, foster a culture that supports innovation. Absolutely that's going to mean encouraging your teams to innovate. But to do that and get that actually to happen, you're going to have to give them an incentive to break the rules and experiment, to give them some guidelines and some maybe even some structured frameworks within which to do it. To foster that kind of a culture is absolutely going to require a balance, striking this great balance between stability and innovation. And that is the key to long-term success. As a marketing leader, you are on the forefront of driving innovation and growth. But as you know, you're not alone in this journey. So there are other folks in your organization, such as your brand teams, that may benefit from this conversation. They play a pivotal role in transforming market insights into actual product strategies. They'll get some great perspective on balancing feedback from buyers with market trends and it'll help them as they're making these kind of informed product decisions about keeping your brand relevant and competitive. Your marketing operations team may also benefit from this. They're the ones ensuring that your tactics and your go-to-market strategies are executed seamlessly. This may help them get them on board with your vision. It may help them give you good feedback on what's required to get there and help them appropriately react to the evolving market dynamics. Of course, we all win together. So getting that whole team aligned on product innovation and marketing strategy is going to ensure that your organization stays ahead in the competitive landscape. Thanks for listening in on this conversation. For more information about how a radio by RRD can ignite strategies, inspire action, and influence outcomes. Check us out at rrd.com.