Slides from the session on "7 Ways to Generate Ideas for New Product Features" delivered by John O'Brien at the Product Camp held on April 9th, 2016 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1. John O’Brien

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3. SESSION EVALUATIONS
www.lanyrd.com/2016/productcamp-boston-
sessions/schedule/
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4.  My email is john.obrien@gmail.com
 Just ask me if you want the slides, and I’ll send them to you
 Or give me your business card
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5.  I’m a Director of Product Management at Wolters Kluwer, a large information
services firm, focused on creating products to help people who work in insurance
compliance.
 I’ve been doing product stuff for about eight years.
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6.  You wake up every day and try to thing of new features for your products that will
really make a dent in your market.
 What tools can help you generate new ideas?
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7.  Analysis of your products strengths and weaknesses versus competitors and
substitutes.
 In-depth knowledge of your customers problems and have a sense of your decision
makers criteria for making a purchasing decision.
 SWOT analysis of your product’s position in the market.
 A workflow analysis of what customers before and after they user your product.
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8. In honor of us being in the Microsoft NERD center, I choose Excel the example
product.
“Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet developed by Microsoft for Windows,Mac OS X,
and iOS. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and
amacro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications. It has been a
very widely applied spreadsheet for these platforms, especially since version 5 in
1993, and it has replaced Lotus 1-2-3 as the industry standard for spreadsheets.
Excel forms part of Microsoft Office.”
- Wikipedia
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9. Ease of Use Collaboration Graphing Statistics Price
Excel (with
Office365)
Google Sheets
Think-Cell
SPSS
This is only a partial list. See a full list of spreadsheet software on wikipedia.
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This is only an example competitor analysis for Excel. If I was really the Excel PM,
this would probably be much bigger.

10. Strengths
•Dominant market share (750 million users
worldwide)
•Tightly integrated with the dominant office
software suite (Microsof Office) and the
dominant desktop operatin system (Microsoft
Windows)
Opportunities
•Continued cultural emphasis on predictive
analytics and data analysis may represent an
opportunity for increased overall adoption
Threats
•TCO of new online spreadsheets (Google
Docs, Zoho) and open source alternatives
(Libre Office) may be less expensive
Weaknesses
•Expensive versus free competitors
•Limited charting capabilities for some uses
•Limited statistical analysis capabilities versus
some substitutes (SPSS, R)
S W
TO
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12.  The feature ideas for Excel may or may not be good ideas; the point of the
examples is to demonstrate how to use the 7 suggested approaches to generate
ideas for new product features.
 Whether they are good ideas or not would be determined through the market
validation process used by your organization to make a GO/NO GO decision on
new features
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13. If you sell the users flour to make
cupcakes, start selling cupcakes
Example feature for Excel: Improve
Mail Merge integration
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14. Serve the current use cases better than
you serve them now
Example for Excel: Better handling of
large files, better graphics, more Tufte-
esque graphing options
A LOT of this has already been done for
Excel
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15. Integrate with other tools or solutions
that your firm sells and/or that exist in
the users environment.
Example feature for Excel: Two way
integration with SPSS
Again, a LOT of this has already been
done for Excel, particularly with Office.
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16. Add a feature that is intended to increase the
product appeal to a new potential customer
or a new customer group within existing
customers
Example feature for Excel: Add support
Logistic Regression, built-in formulas for
Bayesian Inference, etc. to go after statistical
modeling users.
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17. Evaluate an idea that worked in a different
market and ask whether the same idea,
when adapted to your product, would be a
good idea
Example for Excel: Ad supported content
works for email (see Gmail). Create a
stripped-down version of Office 365 Excel
online supported by ad revenue.
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18. Take a recent innovation and ask what
constraints you previously operated under
which are relaxed by the new technology
Example for Excel: New tools to work with
big data are available. Create UI
abstractions of those tools be utilized via
Excel to provide new cloud-computing-like
capabilities for desktop users
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19. Double-down on an area where your competitor
analysis has indicated both that customers would
find the new feature appealing, and competitors
and substitutes for your solution are weaker than
where your product currently is
Example for Excel: In our competitor analysis,
most other products are weak on ease-of-use.
Double down on Ease of Use via exploratory
interviews, new interface paradigms for tablets,
etc.
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20. 1. Move Upstream or Downstream of Current Product Use
2. More, Faster, Better
3. Bundle and Integrate
4. New Features for New Markets
5. Could That Work in My Market?
6. Productize a Technology Change
7. Be Strong Where They are Weak
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21.  Questions?
 If I didn’t get a chance to answer your question(s), feel free to email me:
john.obrien@gmail.com
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