Ask. Innovate. Measure.
There are a lot of tools around to help you remember to stay focused. And, ironically, many of them are quite complex. Design thinking, Lean, Agile and many others are great, but I'm always working to keep processes and tools simple; making them easy to remember, quick to implement and straight forward to assess. That's why I use A.I.M. - Ask, Innovate, Measure.
A.I.M. is an acronym or mnemonic that's intended to remind you of the most important parts of the innovation process in your product or service (truth be told, it's a good process for solving most any problem). It reflects that:
your customer is the guiding light around which you flutter like a moth
it's your job (and you are uniquely suited) to develop the solution set
judgement and perception are inherently flawed, so you need a disciplined approach to evaluating effectiveness
As you would expect, this is not a winding path that leads to a mountain top. Product innovation is a process and customers and markets are organisms with constantly changing dynamics and narratives. Building compelling products and services takes insight, trial, error and of course learning. So, get to it.
Ask
First you must seek to understand (the problem). For many of us, listening might be the hardest step. And, your goal should be beyond "just" listening and be in the direction of deep listening. To do so, you'll want to:
Listen to learn
Listen for understanding rather than agreement
Ask powerful questions
While asking a customer how they might solve their own problem is often an insightful question, it rarely results in the "right" solution.
Innovate
Now that you've heard the problem, it's time to apply your tool kit. You bring to the problem a world of skills, experiences, people and processes that should enable solutions at the intersection of novel, effective and possible. There are lots of paths to getting to a product, but fundamentally, you need to create a prototype, or something you can test.
Measure
Measurement is not just "seeing what happens". Critically, it is the disciplined approach of developing a hypothesis and evaluating the outcomes against it. Given our cognitive bias, there are all kinds of opportunities to convince yourself that your results are "good enough" or "different than expected, but still positive". This path leads to false positives and lots of wasted time and money. And, the discipline of clearly defining the expected outcomes is equally important in designing a good test. If you haven't explored the answers you're likely to get, it's probable that you'll be asking the wrong questions.
Yay! You've made it! Well, "made it" in the sense that you should now know a lot more than you did before. But remember, this is a process. And hopefully, it's one you love, because building a great product is often more about iteration than destination.
If you realize you're working really hard, but haven't been doing this, then it's time to stop and check in to make sure you're still building the right thing. Or, to realize you've got some serious organizational friction...a topic for another post.