Comments on: New Features Masquerade as Innovation

By: Measure the Impact of Your Tech R&D Spend, Not the Amount | Software Industry Insights

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 14:08:23 +0000

[...] The truth is that most companies spend the majority of their resources on bug fixes and feature enhancements, simply trying to hold on to customers and revenues via a traditional upgrade cycle, while trying to convince others (and maybe themselves) that the new versions incorporate many innovations (“New and Improved!”, “Your shirts will be 10% whiter!”). But in most cases these are merely features masquerading as innovation. [...]

By: Jake

Jake — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 21:20:53 +0000

I still disagree that users aren’t very good at vocalizing what they want. Quite the contrary in fact.

Users generally talk about pain points first and vision second, if at all. Pain points can uncover great vertical use cases that you haven’t foreseen, which in turn, advances the overall strategy. Those are the ones I like most.

This gets at your point about innovation too, i.e. unforeseen innovation.

Innovation in my mind is scratching an itch with technology.

By: Glenn Gruber

Glenn Gruber — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 15:28:53 +0000

Jake, thanks for continuing the conversation. I agree that we’re not far apart. I guess two main differences:

1. I agree with you that customer feedback is a critical part of identifying new features and capabilities to incorporate into the product roadmap and moving a product forward. I just dont’ think that customers/users are very good at vocalizing what they want, especially big ideas. So I meant you can’t ask them directly, but we agree that looking at their behavior tells you a lot. But most of what they tell you will be incremental in value, not game changing.

2. I understand that AppsLab’s mission is to experiment with technology. I was just pointing out that technology doesn’t equal innovation, that there are other aspects, but that many tech companies only look at it from a technology perspective.

By: Jake

Jake — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:42:23 +0000

Thanks for dissecting my post.
Now that I can comment, here goes:

1. I prefer the term users b/c my team doesn’t have customers, i.e. no one pays us. There is frequently a fundamental difference between the people who buy a product and those who use it, at least with enterprise software. So, users and customers aren’t synonyms.

2. The purpose of my team (AppsLab) is to experiment with new ideas and technologies to see what works. So, in our case, innovation is tied to technology.

3. You should ask users what they want. How can you affect behavioral change if you don’t study the behavior?

4. Even though you should ask users what they want, your strategy should include other aspects. Expect that your users will generally be underwhelmed by innovation b/c they prefer incremental enhancements.

5. I think we’re making the same point about Facebook’s redesign troubles.

Not sure where the disagreement is here. My team does invest in innovative features, despite the fact that our users would prefer other more operational features.

The only place where I can see that we diverge is that I ask users what they want, and you advise against this. Frankly, you don’t have to ask, they’ll tell you anyway