Managing Innovation: Empower your team to take risks, think for themselves and reach audacious goals. From La Product Conference Madrid 2019

1. Managing
Innovation
Stephen M. Walker II
Head of Product & Design @ Freeletics

2. SMWII
16 Years
Building
Digital
Products
2003 – Present

3. SMWII
Personalized
fitness and
nutrition
coaching
Freeletics

4. Managing Innovation
Empower your team to
take risks, think for
themselves, and reach
audacious goals.

5. Or better said…
The processes and tools I
use to build, manage, and
empower my teams to think
for themselves, take risks,
and reach audacious goals.

6. Quentin
Tarantino

7. Inspired by Quentin…
Before diving into the
details, I will outline
the three key pillars of
managing innovation.

8. Team
The right people
Environment
Culture & structure
Strategy
Clear & concise
01
02
03

9. Team, environment, and strategy…
The people that make up your
team, the environment and
culture you shape, and the clarity
in your strategy are the most
important factors to successfully
managing innovation.

10. Ditch quick fixes and focus on your team
You can wrap amazing processes… what
works at Amazon, the newest framework,
what works at Google, buzzword of the
week… but at the end of the day they won’t
matter without carefully editing the team,
setting up the right environment for their
success, or pointing the team toward the
star you believe is true north.

11. Defining
innovation

12. “If you want to invent, do
any innovation, anything
new, you’re going to have
failures because you need
to experiment.” – Jeff Bezos

13. A new application
of an idea to
solve a problem

14. Palo
Alto
Research
Center

15. Xerox PARC
The 20th century witnessed a shift
from individual inventors like Thomas
Edison to institutions. PARC is
responsible for foundational inventions
in modern computing, ranging from the
desktop computer to ethernet to
object-oriented programming.

16. UberCab Pitch Deck

17. UberCab
An excellent example of market
innovation is the first iteration of
Uber, then known as UberCab. Uber
leveraged existing technologies and
cars, remixing them to bring an
exciting new experience to the world.

18. Apple iOS
Contentful
Facebook
GetStream
Google Android
Spotify
Stripe
Transifex

19. Freeletics
At Freeletics we leverage a wide
array of hardware and software
innovations to bring our product
to market. Without these, our
market innovation would not be
possible.

20. Diffusion
Market innovation
Invention
Foundational innovation
Innovation Continuum

21. What do innovative
environments have in
common?

22. Countless hours of
retrospectives and
research on innovation
surfaced these nine
elements…

23. Autonomy
Common goal
Complimentary skills
Leadership support
Passion for the mission
Reward shipping
Safety to fail
Shared tools
Small team

24. Autonomy
Teams have autonomy in
designing and
implementing the solution –
but not always in selecting
the problem to solve.

25. Common Goal
Alignment around a common
goal is absolutely required. In
large organizations, imagine
what your team’s goal might
look like as a small startup.

26. Complimentary Skills
A balance of skills from
consumer empathy, data
analysis, design, and
engineering are required
for successful innovation.

27. Leadership Support
Projects without support
from senior leaders
sometimes succeed – but
chances are they will fail or
be killed.

28. Passion for the Mission
People with a true passion
for the mission behind their
work will wake up early,
stay late, and obsess over
the details.

29. Reward Shipping
Drop recognition for
personality or politics,
and focus on outcomes
and shipping.

30. Safety to Fail
A culture of experimentation
is required to succeed. Many
experiments will fail, but
progress must be
recognized.

31. Shared Tools
From shared
languages and process
(Design Sprints) to
software (Github).

32. Small Team
Highly successful teams
average at five people.
Find the smallest unit
possible for success.

33. Shipping the
team

34. “The team with the
best players wins.”
– Jack Welch

35. I don’t ship product
— I ship the team
that ships the
product

36. Unless you write code,
you don’t ship the product
either. You support the
team that does.

37. Challenge to all Product Managers
Get involved in hiring
and help shape your
team.

38. How to assemble your team
Experience and education
matter, but focus on soft skills
and the conversation details
with candidates. I focus on
the following nine traits.

39. Ambition
Details
Curiosity
Impact
Passion
Polish
Resilience
Teamwork
Values

40. Shaping the
environment

41. “Robustness is when you care more
about the few who like your work
than the multitude that hate it
(artists). Fragility is when you care
more about the few who hate your
work than the multitude who love it
(politicians). ” – Nassim Taleb

42. Shaping a product environment
One of my goals as a product
leader is to build autonomy
in my team while aligning
across development teams
and departments.

43. How to shape the product environment
I use one tool (operating
plan) and two processes
(weekly product review and
monthly roadmap review)
to achieve this.

44. Team Operating Plan
The operating plan is similar to
a business plan for the team.
It’s designed to help each team
reflect on past learnings and
create their future.

45. Elements of the Operating Plan
Each plan details the
team’s mission and
customers, learnings,
roadmap for the future, and
measurements of success.

46. Weekly Product Review
A weekly forum to discuss
upcoming releases – both
customer facing and A/B
tests – with cross-
discipline leaders.

47. Monthly Roadmap Review
A monthly forum to discuss
the rolling roadmap with
engineering leaders and
representatives from each
department in the company.

48. Clarifying the
strategy

49. “Luck is not a factor.
Hope is not a strategy.”
– James Cameron

50. The Why
Your team will move mountains
for the mission. I use every
opportunity possible to reiterate
why I wake up every day and why
I moved around the world to
work on Freeletics.

51. The Future
To steal from IDEO: a picture is
worth a thousand words, a
prototype is worth a thousand
meetings. Do everything possible,
including sketches to illustrate
your vision for the future.

52. Principles
Define and communicate
your product principles.
These inform decisions and
assist in moving debates
forward.

53. When to communicate strategy
Every day, everywhere. I use
my personal communication,
meetings, and all-hands as
opportunities to reinforce the
why, the vision, and principles.

54. Embrace the
journey

55. Hard work is hard.

56. It should be obvious, however
Set expectations. Challenge
ambitions. And
communicate truths. But
remember to recognize and
celebrate accomplishments.

57. “It's the doing of it. It's the process.
It's the getting there. It's the journey.
The journey is everything. It makes
the destination worthwhile. You can
only have a worthwhile destination
after a worthwhile journey.”

58. Don’t get lost
It’s easy to forget about the
journey when focused on
outcomes, measurements, and
goals. The journey matters just
as much as achieving them.

59. My challenge to you…
Make the journey
creating and shipping
products enjoyable for
you and your team.

60. Thank you.
@aethelyon