Product Innovation & how it happens

As part of the Reforge Product Strategy course I’m taking, Fareed Mosavat, previously of Slack, shared yesterday a great case study about Slack’s Growth loops and how they tackled increasing conversion of paid users.

Fareed explained how his team started out from the ‘big hairy problem’ of self-serve monetization, worked on understanding the monetization engine, then identifying optimization opportunities. They were then able to pinpoint ‘smaller’ problems of user awareness in addition to identifying Saving message history as an important user problem.

To me this is a wonderful example of product innovation. Product innovation doesn’t mean coming up with a crazy world-changing idea, but, counterintuitively perhaps, a discipline in a discovery process, and understanding user problems before jumping into solutions.

For that innovation to happen, I believe two things need to be in place:

• Product teams need to have autonomy. This means going into a quarter not knowing what to build, but knowing very well the goal we’re trying to achieve.

• The planning process needs to support the above, focus on goals and problems, and stay away from solutions as much as possible.

If you want to learn more about monetization, highly recommend this talk by Fareed.

To learn more about a planning process that allows innovation, highly recommend Gibson Biddle’s How to Run a Quarterly Product Strategy Meeting with Gibson Biddle, former VP Product, Netflix.