We Can’t Schedule Innovation, But We Can Schedule Discovery - Rich Mironov's Product Bytes

We can’t make a user love something we built or spontaneously declare us to be innovative.

We don’t get to decide if something is innovative – the market decides. And this is a perceptual judgment – how users feel and think – rather than me deciding that my hard work deserves the “innovation” label.

We can schedulediscovery : the intentional, organized, thoughtful, stepwise, interview-based search for real insights. We can regularly get out of our corporate bubbles and talk with (listen to!) large numbers of actual users/customers/prospects.

Because it doesn’t matter what our product managers (or executives or salespeople or investors) think… our ultimate users and buyers get to decide if something is valuable or entertaining or innovative.