Product Innovation for Product Managers

with Karen Holst

THE INNOVATION KNOWLEDGE REPOSITORY

Introduction
The Innovation Knowledge Repository is a tool to store all the ideas, strategies, processes, and conversations around product innovation.
Plan to refer to it frequently to communicate with teams and stakeholders. The template is made up of the following three sections:

Day-to-day Project life cycle Product

performance success factors innovation process

The template includes examples of what might be useful to add into each section. Use it as a guide to create your own Innovation
Knowledge Repository and note that it will be more useful and accessible if you fill it out and track electronically.

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 DAY-TO-DAY PERFORMANCE
The goal of tracking your work is to ensure your “day job” and performance are on course while you are innovating.
Tracking, and then sharing the evidence of the value you and your team create with stakeholders, can give you the
freedom to execute in new areas. Be sure to track both data and stories. The data will reflect performance against the
organization’s bottom line, and the stories will highlight important moments of value.

QUANTITATIVE DATA
Track execution against key performance indicators, team goals and metrics, and business performance.

QUALITATIVE DATA
Keep track of success stories of customer satisfaction or lessons learned along the way.

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 PROJECT LIFE CYCLE SUCCESS FACTORS
The critical success factors of a project’s life cycle will make or break your project’s success. The goal of this section is to
help you manage risk. Use this section to document your innovation work as an ongoing project and track key factors
critical for successful project completion, including project mission, stakeholder buy-in, and troubleshooting.

PROJECT MISSION
Outline the goals for the project and continue to evaluate if the project is on track toward the mission.

STAKEHOLDER BUY-IN
List stakeholders, empathize and understand needs, and track questions and conversations along the way.

TROUBLESHOOTING
Prepare for some potential challenges along the way and document when there are for
discussion postmortem.

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 PRODUCT INNOVATION PROCESS
Tracking your innovation phases will allow you and your team to embrace the process as an iterative cycle of learning,
giving you flexibility to try out new things and prototype the ideas. Your innovation journey starts with identifying the right
innovation process that will fit within the unique context of your company. Once a process is identified, ensure the main
phases of innovation are included: discovering, creating, testing, and scaling ideas.

OUTLINE PROCESS
Outline your process and identify key phases of innovation: discovering, creating, testing,
and scaling ideas.

CREATE TIMELINE
Set timeline for workshops, kickoffs, prototypes, research, launch, etc. Include stakeholders for
each phase.

QUESTIONS
For more tools in product innovation, check out the LinkedIn Learning course Product Innovation for Product Managers or
visit www.start-within.com.

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