Creating a new product or big new feature inside a company comes with an entirely different level of difficulty compared to optimizations. The good news is that there are battle-tested techniques to increase the odds that you will be successful.

We all know the failure points:

1. We get caught up in our vision and don't tune closely into what the customer and market really need

2. We fail to navigate the politics of innovation and funding inside our companies

3. We fail to ruthlessly test critical assumptions about our entire business model, and thus turn small failures into big ones

This class is designed to show you methods for overcoming these failure points. Because this is better learned in a hands-on way, you will practice on your real work. And while it's a 5-week class, you should walk away with immediately-applicable takeaways each week.

The methods we'll cover are grounded in years of practical experience. I've seen them work as a Chief Product Officer overseeing a 150-person product team, and as a consultant working directly with companies like Mayo Clinic, Steelcase, Time Inc, and Hearst to improve how they innovate. My books on these topics are faved by the likes of Eric Ries and Steve Blank and used in companies, accelerators, and universities around the world.

You will bring your own project into the class, done in a way that protects your confidentiality. You will run it through a rigorous gauntlet of activities over several weeks that should hone:

  * How to ensure strategic alignment and financial impact 

  * How to do effective customer research and discovery

  * How to design, test, implement, and utilize experiments

 * How to set up an ongoing cadence of effective decision making and risk management

 * How to can navigate stakeholders and the politics of innovation

Tuesday classes will be a mixture of sharing examples and tips, as well as hands-on practice time. Each week, there is also an optional roundtable session to ask questions, get feedback on your work, and learn from each other.

WHAT WE WILL COVER

Pre-class: decide on the idea you are bringing into the class and also decide if you can work in “public” or if your idea needs to be mostly confidential (see Statement of Confidentiality below). The class has been designed for either to work.

Class 1: Workshop our risks, impact, and alignment. Activities: assumptions and risk mapping, strategy mapping, value/impact statement (including financial impact). 

 Take-home assignment: create a mini-model on the financial impact of your idea.

Class 2: Customer discovery/research. Activities: demo best practices, discuss recruitment methods and challenges, create research plan and interview guide. 

  Take-home assignment: at least 1 customer interview or observation.

Class 3: Risk refinement and decision-making. Activities: practice research synthesis, create a risks dashboard, make continue/kill/pivot decision

  Take-home assignment: at least 1 customer interview -or- 1 colleague interview, update risks dashboard.

Class 4: Pre-Product Experiments. Activities: discuss examples of pre-product experiments (as opposed to A/B testing), brainstorm exercise, completion of experiment template for your top idea.

  Take-home assignment: at least 1 customer interview -or- mini-experiment, update risks dashboard.

Class 5: Innovation politics. Activities: discussion of stakeholder management, pre-mortem exercise, risk assessment and mitigation plan, and analysis of next steps.

Statement of Confidentiality: Because I want students bringing real ideas into the class in order to make meaningful progress on real work, I understand that some of these ideas might be confidential in nature. Students will have the ability to tell me in writing if the idea is confidential in nature. Students will then have the choice of working either in private or in a way viewable by the cohort. I, Giff Constable, commit to preserving the confidentiality of all student ideas marked in writing as confidential. The details of ideas marked as confidential, as well as the artifacts created during the class, will not be disclosed to other students nor anyone outside of the class except by the student’s own volition. In other words, I will keep my mouth completely shut and you can decide how much you want to share.