3 Tips to Help Product Teams Foster Innovation
For product teams, it’s no secret that innovation is the fuel that leads to better ideas, clearer objectives and more efficient processes.
But how do we spark innovation in the first place?
This week is National Innovation Day, but if your team is stuck in a rut and ideas aren’t flowing right now, here are three ways to kickstart innovative thinking again.
1. Embrace the Messiness
Sometimes product creators let the fear of failure hold them back in an attempt to create the perfect product.
Perfect does not exist.
At Living Spec, we talk a lot about ideas being messy and they’re not always the immediate lightbulb moment we would hope for. The journey of product creation isn’t a straightforward path, so stop trying to be perfect upfront!
Instead, accept that bumps in the road are all part of the messy but brilliant process of creating products.
2. Streamline your communications
Effective communication between product teams is now more important than ever. With remote working and multiple digital communication platforms, important information easily gets lost in translation.
To better understand key specification details and fully grasp the knowledge needed for the current day's work, product teams need to find more efficient ways of collaborating. Tools such as the context graph feature in Living Spec provides a visual representation of your entire product, so the entire team can easily understand how spec details, ideas, files, and tasks are connected and their impact on our success. Quite an upgrade from a traditional mindmap!
3. Look outside your team
Encourage greater collaboration with all areas of the company, whether that be the marketing intern or the head of customer service.
Inspiration can arise in some of the most unlikely places and can strike when you’re least expecting it. Make sure your team is ready to capture ideas when they occur, like with Living Spec’s email parsing. Email parsing lets you import your ideas into an existing spec when you’re on the go using any device by simply forwarding or sending an email directly to your Living Spec file. So if you’re in the middle of a conversation with Sandra from sales, you can act quickly to capture your idea when it hit.
Want to find out more about how Living Spec can help your product team collaborate better and fuel innovation?
