Demystifying the Innovation Journey – A Map for B2B Product Managers

B2B product innovation is the process of creating new products that generate increased value for your customers and your company. This means that for products to succeed, they need to solve a pain that customers are willing to pay for. While at the same time generating a significant return on investment for their company. Product innovation is not a destination. It’s a journey with many twists and turns that start with an idea and end with a successful product achieving scale.

Unfortunately, most companies struggle to generate value from their innovation efforts. In other words, companies big and small waste a lot of time and money creating software products nobody wants to buy. The problem, as mentioned in this HBR article, is not a lack of ideas. Companies have a lot of ideas that sound promising, but they never materialize as innovative products. The problem is not the idea but the process of turning an idea into a product that customers want to pay for.

Many B2B companies short-circuit the innovation journey either because they believe they already know what the market wants or don’t have the skills and processes to be customer-centric throughout the development process.

You need to change your perspective to increase your chances of success and reduce the risk of launching a product nobody wants to buy. In my book, The B2B Innovator’s Map, I recommend focusing on the early stages of the B2B product innovation journey: specifically, the stages that take your product from idea to your first ten customers.

Why focus your B2B product innovation only from idea to your first ten customers?

Focusing on your first ten customers allows you to explore the pains of similar customers and fine-tune your product to ensure value delivery. In other words, it is the best way to reduce risk and avoid an expensive trainwreck.

In the world of enterprise software and IoT solutions, every customer can be very different from each other, even if they belong to the same target market. For example, your enterprise customers might have different organizational structures, legacy systems to integrate with, distinct compliance requirements, etc.

Delivering value to your first ten customers doesn’t mean you are ready to scale. It only means that you have an excellent understanding of your customers and know you can deliver value to this target market. Ten customers serve as a concrete milestone for starting discussions with your leadership team on the next step for your new product.

Related article: Enterprise Software – A Primer for B2B Product Managers.

The Six Stages of the B2B Innovator’s Map

In my book, I divide the journey from idea to your first ten customers into six distinct stages. I call these stages the B2B Innovator’s Map. The six stages are:

1. Strategic Alignment
2. Market Discovery
3. User Discovery
4. Solution Planning
5. Prototyping
6. Early Adopter

The diagram below shows how these six stages work together to map the B2B product innovation journey from idea to your first ten customers.

As you can see from the diagram, getting to your first ten customers is an iterative process. Moving from one stage to the next doesn’t mean you have completed that stage. It only means that you have strong customer evidence from that stage that you need to put to the test in the next stage.

With every iteration, you might advance one stage or move back one or more stages. And that’s OK. This method ensures you always focus on the most promising ideas and spend the least effort and resources on ideas that will go nowhere.

Below is a summary of the six stages of the B2B Innovator’s Map. At every stage, you’ll learn something new about your customer, and you’ll continue to fine-tune your offering until you can deliver value to your first ten customers.

Stage one – Strategic Alignment

In the Strategic alignment stage of the product innovation journey, you’ll collaborate with your leadership team to explore opportunities aligned with your company’s strategy and agree on a particular customer’s business outcome to explore. Examples of business outcomes include helping your customers reduce their travel expenses, assisting companies to lower their electricity bills, or helping companies track assets more efficiently.

Along with that agreement, you’ll define success metrics, secure resources, define your innovation team and advisory board, and agree on how to report progress throughout your journey.

Stage two – Market Discovery

In the Market discovery stage, you will explore the market opportunity for the customer’s business outcome you agreed to during the strategic alignment stage. You’ll work to narrow down on a specific target market to go after (including industry, company size, geography, and use case).

You’ll also spend time understanding the characteristics and pains of your Champion (the person in your customer’s organization who is responsible for achieving a business outcome.)

In the market discovery stage, you’ll also research whether the target market you selected is big enough to support your new business.

Selecting a target market does not guarantee you’ll find traction for your product. It only means you have narrowed down your universe of options so you can deep-dive into the challenges of your customers in this market to understand if your idea has potential or not.

For example, you might discover that the pain in that market is not big enough to demand a new solution or that there aren’t enough companies experiencing the pain to support your business. At that point, you can agree with your company to look into a different market or go back to the Strategic alignment stage to agree on another customer’s business outcome to explore.

Stage three – User Discovery

In the Market discovery stage, you select a target market and identify your customer’s pain. This information is critical for defining a product roadmap, but it is not enough. Now you need to understand the pains and workflows of all the people within your customer’s organization who will use your solution and whose collective output result in solving the Champion’s pain. I call all these different users your user ecosystem.

In the User discovery stage, you will need to identify, research, and prioritize your user ecosystem throughout the enterprise customer journey, from sales to installation, deployment, operations, and more.

Stage four – Solution Planning

Stages one, two, and three of the journey focus on understanding the problem to solve. As well as the market and the people who experience that problem. Stages four, five, and six focus on incrementally testing and developing your solution to address that problem.

The goal of the Solution planning stage is to plan for the work ahead. This is the time to discuss how you and your team will approach testing and building a solution to solve your Champion’s pain.

By planning, I don’t mean the waterfall way of planning. Instead, during this stage, you will:

1. Prioritize the users to focus on first.
2. Create a Solution Diagram to get alignment on what you plan to build.
3. Create an Experiment Roadmap to test with your prospects during the Prototyping stage and test with your first ten pilot customers during the Early adopter stage.

This stage also helps you align with your leadership team on your next steps and agree on the support you will need moving forward, including people, funds, equipment, and vendors.

Recommended reading: If you are building an IoT product, check out my IoT Decision Framework. It is a great complement to the B2B Innovator’s Map to help you define, organize, and communicate the complexity of your IoT solution.

Stage five – Prototyping

The Prototyping stage focuses on building prototypes to test with prospects in your target market. In other words, it’s about experimenting and getting real-world evidence on whether your solution can solve your customer’s pain.

With every experiment you make, you’ll gain new customer insights to incorporate into a new iteration of your solution. These insights allow your solution to move from sketches to wireframes to low-fidelity prototypes to high-fidelity prototypes until you finally get your first paid customer and deliver a working prototype or beta product.

Experimentation applies to every component of your offering, including your technical solution, monetization model, services, and partnerships. In the Prototyping stage, you need to focus on testing your assumptions across three dimensions:

• Desirability – Does your target market want your offering?
• Viability – Can you make money with your offering?
• Feasibility – Can your company build and operate the resulting solution?

Related post: Listen to my podcast interview with David Bland on how to test business ideas.

Stage six – Early Adopter

Getting your first paid customer is a huge milestone. It means that at least one Champion sees your solution’s potential, and they believe you can provide value. But you haven’t demonstrated that value yet. In the Early adopter stage, you’ll work closely with your first ten customers to ensure you can deliver value.

The goals of the Early adopter stage are:

• Demonstrate (in the field) that your solution can solve your customer’s pain.
• Continue testing for desirability, feasibility, and viability as you learn what it takes to deploy and operate your offering.

During this stage, you’ll put together all the tools, skills, and insights you’ve gathered from previous stages and work closely with your first pilot customers to deliver value. You will also start testing your assumptions throughout the enterprise customer journey and fine-tuning your product’s features to deliver on your promise.

The learnings you’ll get from your first customer will be invaluable, but they are not enough for you to know if your offering has potential in your target market. To get more confidence that you genuinely know your customers and that you can solve their problems, you need to deliver the same value to ten customers.

Dive deeper into the six stages of the B2B Innovator’s Map

This article is an excerpt from my bestselling book, The B2B Innovator’s Map. If you want to dive deeper and learn a proven, step-by-step framework to navigate the innovation journey, then you can buy the book from Amazon or enroll in my online program, Mastering B2B Product Innovation.

The Bottom Line

Creating new B2B products, whether they are enterprise software or IoT solutions, is complex, and success is uncertain. Most companies fail because they don’t take the time to understand their customers or they don’t have a structured approach to guide them through the product innovation journey. By focusing on your first ten customers and following the six stages of the B2B product innovation journey, you’ll increase your chances of success in providing value to your customer AND your company.

Recommended article: Cracking the Code: How to Access Elusive B2B Users for Product Discovery.