Kevin S.

One trap to avoid is relying overly much on engineers to create innovation. Engineers can tend to fall back on their skill sets, so you end up answering the question "What CAN I do?" instead of "What SHOULD I do?". Marketing experience, and customer interaction, along with the right thought leaders, are how you drive the early stages of innovation. Once those goals are well defined, then you challenge the engineers to meet those goals.

Innovation flows from many directions. One possibility are live events where the public attends and interacts. Getting a lot of feedback quickly can help innovation focus, and new ideas might emerge as well. Well-run live events are a resource that is used less than it should be!

Agility is extremely important, but the technical leaders and the marketing leaders must be in close communication; if marketing drives the agility goals too strongly, those goals become impossible to meet - unless you are risking quality. Agility at times has been over-used in technology, as companies rush to release product. This is another area that AI will help in; code generation, code review, standards verifications can all be accerlated with AI. Of particular use will be using AI to improve test suites; the many versions of hardware and software mean that testing takes on a critical role in quality, and agility.

Risk management is an art, and your funds are not unlimited. So you need to balance an approach that addresses the worst possible scenario, with different strategies that handle the more likely scenarios. After all, the worse case, by definition, rarely happens... so your best approach is to focus on protecting against the most likely risks to your cash flow; and to also have, if possible, the first step or two that addresses a worse case scenario - to buy some time.

Your competitors will all be doing standard market analysis to see the trends, customer patterns, and market changes. A modern twist on this would be to use AI to look deeper and/or sooner, to identify new trends. But I always suggest just talking to customers; see what they are thinking, and feeling. Some trends are short-term reactions, the fads - and those fade away. Talk to people. You can also have focus groups of people from various skill sets to explore the market changes; as well as seek out true thought leaders to guide you.

It's not enough to just measure your current customers; they might not be representative, if you have not yet fully understood how people use your product. You can try to tell people what the product is but ultimately, THEY tell YOU what it really is - by how they use it. The first Apple computer was aimed at hobbyists; Jobs and Wozniak just assumed it was their market. A doctor fell in love with the computer and asked Jobs to help make software to run his office. Jobs declined. The doctor even flew out to meet Jobs, begging him to help make the computer work for business. Jobs responded, that it was not their market and to just go away already! Jobs later realized his mistake: he did not yet understand what his market even was.