Journal / Product
Innovation in product management
Early in my career I worked at now.com, one of the first online TV studios in London. Around 500 people. Real investment. And I genuinely couldn't work out why it existed.
Products have a shelf life
Every product follows a curve. It rises, peaks, and — without deliberate intervention — declines. In some industries that cycle is slow. In others, fast. But it always comes.
The companies and products that disappear aren't usually killed by a single bad decision. They're worn down by the accumulation of not asking hard questions — about relevance, about user needs, about where the market is heading.
If you're not innovating, you're not standing still. You're falling behind. The curve always wins eventually.
Innovation requires risk tolerance
Trying something new means being wrong most of the time. That's not a failure of process — it's the nature of experimentation. Most ideas don't work. The ones that do are found by testing quickly and cheaply, not by planning more carefully.
Some people are naturally comfortable with that uncertainty. Others aren't. That's fine — personality varies.
What isn't fixed is the organisational environment. That part is a choice.
Culture is the multiplier
Whether people innovate inside an organisation depends almost entirely on whether it's safe to try and fail.
If new ideas get rewarded — even imperfect ones, even ones that don't pan out — people keep bringing them. If trying something new gets someone sidelined, overlooked, or quietly passed over in the next restructure, the message lands fast. People are rational. They stop sticking their necks out.
The implication is straightforward: innovation is less a talent problem and more an incentive problem. Create the conditions where experimentation is recognised and rewarded, and even cautious people will start to participate. Remove those conditions, and even the most naturally curious people will eventually stop trying.
What this means in practice
For PMs specifically, this plays out in a few concrete ways:
Always know your why. Before designing a feature, a product, or a strategy, be able to answer — clearly, in a few sentences — why it matters and for whom. If you can't, the team underneath you can't either.
Protect the space to experiment. Not every initiative needs a guaranteed ROI at kickoff. Some things need room to be explored before they can be evaluated. A product organisation that only funds certainties will only ever incrementally improve what already exists.
Reward the attempt, not just the outcome. Teams learn from experiments that fail. If failure is only ever quietly buried or blamed, the next experiment won't happen.
The curve is coming for every product. The question is whether the organisation has built the habits to stay ahead of it.
