Successful businesses understand that creativity is not just the domain of a select few but a potential that should be encouraged in every employee. They create systems that encourage and nurture creative thinking at all levels. This might involve regular brainstorming sessions, innovation challenges, or dedicated time for employees to work on passion projects. The most notable of this tradition is the Google 20% time. Extending the college experience into the workplace has been marked with much debate, but the data shows that by encouraging creativity one of five days a week has led to many innovations at Google. Apple also found value in systematically prioritizing and rewarding a culture of creativity. Their new headquarters was purposely designed to foster random interactions between individuals and teams. This melting pot philosophy encourages the exchange of ideas and discovery of novel ideas at every level of the organization. They value this so much that Apple was one of the first organizations to push for a return to office mandate as it was much more difficult to stumble on creative ideas, within their culture, any other way.

Moreover, these organizations recognize that creativity often emerges from diverse perspectives. They actively seek to build teams with varied backgrounds, experiences, and skill sets, understanding that this diversity can lead to more novel ideas and creative approaches to solve problems and drive results.

Research from an old Adobe’s State of Creativity study shows that companies investing in creativity outperform their peers by 78% in terms of revenue generation. Moreover, highly creative organizations report 1.5 times greater market share compared to less creative counterparts. These statistics underline a crucial reality: creativity is not just a differentiator; it is a survival tool in the competitive business landscape.

So, let’s get creative:

Leadership

Leadership plays a pivotal role in cultivating an environment that prioritizes creativity. Unfortunately, most leadership organization are laser focused on driving toward KPIs and results and see results to be axiometric towards creativity. Don’t be that leader. Often, driving toward a metric to get results is unsustainable and ironcially are self sabotaging toward their goals. Focus on leveraging creativity and results. Creative leaders inspire through both vision and action. Research from the Harvard Business Review highlights that 84% of executives agree that creativity is critical for economic growth, yet only 41% believe their companies are adequately equipped to develop creative practices. This disconnect suggests that leaders must go beyond verbal encouragement; they need to demonstrate creativity through policies and personal example.

• Establishing Psychological Safety: Leaders can foster creativity by creating a workplace where employees feel safe to share unconventional ideas. According to a study from Google’s Project Aristotle, teams with high psychological safety are more innovative and productive.
• Modeling learning from Risk-Taking: Leaders should actively take risks to demonstrate that calculated failure is a learning tool rather than a liability. (emphasis on the word “calculated”.) For example, Jeff Bezos has often spoken about Amazon’s willingness to embrace “failed experiments” such as the Fire Phone because they pave the way for successes like AWS. The oft forgotten part is to embrace risk with humility (more on that later) and focus not just on the failure, but take ownership of the lessons and learnings from the failure.
• Allocating Resources for Creative Initiatives: Leaders should fund innovation labs or skunkworks projects. Organizations like Lockheed Martin pioneered this approach, resulting in groundbreaking projects like the SR-71 Blackbird. In fact, often times during the cold ward, companies with pseudo monopolies avoided government regulations and intervention by disproportionately funding creative innovation labs that ultimately led to, amongst many things, the internet. Bell Labs is a great example of this.

Be a creative team.

Teams that thrive creatively often have diverse membership, not just in demographics but also in professional backgrounds and cognitive styles. McKinsey’s Delivering Through Diversity report demonstrates that companies with diverse teams are 35% more likely to outperform their peers financially. This suggests that the diversity of thought and experience inherently drives creative outcomes.

Ways to encourage creativity at the team level include:

• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Encourage employees from different departments to work together on projects. Pixar, for example, like Apple, incorporates a unique workspace design where animators, developers, and executives frequently intersect, sparking serendipitous exchanges of ideas. Fun fact, Steve Jobs, an early investor in Pixar and a huge admirer of their work took many organizational ideas from Pixar and applied it to Apple. It works.
• Dynamic Problem-Solving Workshops: Facilitated workshops using methodologies like Design Thinking help teams break out of traditional approaches to problem-solving. Get people (safely) uncomfortable to get them willing to think differently. One favorite tactic — take your team to an unfamiliar place — in geography, language, or both.
• Inclusive Brainstorming Practices: Ensure that quieter team members have equal opportunity to share ideas by employing techniques like “brain writing,” where participants write down ideas anonymously before group discussions begin.

Middle Management are more than just in the middle: Balancing Creativity and Execution

Middle managers are often tasked with balancing creativity with operational efficiency, a challenge that can sometimes stifle innovation. However, with the right mindset and tools, they can become catalysts for creativity.

• Idea Funnels: Managers can create structured idea funnels where employees submit creative suggestions, which are then evaluated and refined. For example, 3M uses a similar system, resulting in innovations like Post-it Notes.
• Encouraging “Fail Fast” Cultures: Empower teams to experiment with smaller-scale pilots of creative ideas before scaling them, thus reducing fear of failure. Focus on smaller-scale pilots that have minimum downside, but potentially huge learning upside. This allows for reinforcing the psychologically necessary “safe” aspect necessary in a creative culture.
• Recognition Programs: Acknowledge and reward creative contributions in meaningful ways, such as internal awards or visibility for the innovators. Focus not just on the act or the outcome, but on what specifically made this creative and what was learned.

Individual Contributors: Yes, you too have a role in bringing creativity into your every day.

The employees closest to customers or, let's be honest, doing the daily grind of work hold untapped reservoirs of creativity. Harnessing this resource requires providing these employees with platforms and tools to share ideas.

• Customer-Centric Innovation Programs: Frontline employees are often the first to notice inefficiencies or opportunities for improvement. Organizations like Ritz-Carlton empower their staff to address customer challenges creatively, setting aside a budget for immediate action without managerial approval. Toyota pioneered this belief by allowing any one on the factory floor to stop production and introduce creative ideas for improvement.
• Continuous Learning Opportunities: Providing access to training on creative problem-solving tools and frameworks like SCAMPER (Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to other uses, Eliminate, and Reverse) helps frontline staff contribute more effectively to innovation.
• Everyone is a creative: most importantly, embrace the belief that creativity is not just the domain of the designers or marketeers. That you too are a creative and that your success isn’t going to be from doing your job the same way you did yesterday, or last year, or your predecessor, but by achieving your goals and looking for creative and novel ways to improve your outcomes. Ultimately, that is your job.

Building Creativity Into Organizational Rituals

Creative companies often incorporate creativity into their everyday culture through rituals and traditions. These rituals reinforce the value of creative thinking and make it a natural part of employees’ lives. Try these:

• Hackathons and Innovation Challenges: Companies like Facebook and Atlassian hold regular hackathons where employees can work on passion projects. Atlassian’s “ShipIt Days” have produced features like Jira’s mobile interface.
• Open-Mic Forums: Encouraging employees to pitch wild ideas during regular open forums ensures that creative thinking becomes habitual. Amazon’s “Voice of the Employee” sessions exemplify this principle.
• Creative Sabbaticals: Allowing employees to step away from routine tasks to pursue personal creative projects, as Adobe does with its “Kickbox” innovation toolkit, fosters breakthroughs.

Conclusion

So, feeling creative yet? Organizations that embed creativity into every level thrive because they recognize that creativity is not the domain of a few but the responsibility of all. And the ROI for focusing on creativity is very positive. Research from Forrester found that creativity-led businesses achieve 10% greater efficiency, showing that embracing creativity does not come at the cost of productivity. Furthermore, companies with high creativity scores show 1.6 times higher employee engagement, which directly correlates with improved retention and reduced recruitment costs.

By fostering creative leadership, encouraging diverse and collaborative teams, empowering middle management to balance innovation with operations, and tapping into the creative potential of all individual contributors, businesses can unlock transformative outcomes. From Google’s 20% time to Apple’s collision-inducing headquarters, the evidence is clear: when creativity becomes a priority, innovation, engagement, and financial performance follow. Organizations must not only celebrate creativity but also integrate it into the very DNA of their processes, systems, and culture to thrive in an ever-changing world. Creativity is the engine, and when every part of the organization fuels it, the results can be extraordinary.

Jacobi was a 19th century German mathematician known for his unique approach of inversion as a means of understanding tough problems. His belief was that by inverting the problem, where it’s often easier to understand what doesn’t work, one can figure out what does work. And, there can be no tougher problem than trying to understand why so many businesses, while well intentioned with intelligent, skilled, passionately committed employees, companies consistently and probabilistically will fail. And, let’s be honest… most companies fail to meet the promises of their founders at their inception. This isn’t an attempt at being critical. Entrepreneurship is hard. This is an attempt at looking objectively at the data and trying to understand the gap between the promise and the reality.

According to recent data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, approximately 23.2% of private sector businesses in the United States fail within their first year of operation. This means that about 76.8% of businesses survive past the crucial one-year mark. A strong sign. However, looking five years out, 48% of businesses have closed their doors, indicating almost a 50/50 chance of success. Finally, most indicative, at the ten-year mark, when a business should have by all means, “figured it out,” sees an even higher failure rate, with 65.3% of businesses having ceased operations. Said differently, two out of three businesses will fail. Imagine, after ten years, becoming an expert at your business, sacrificing for a decade in so many personal and public ways, but knowing that the odds are generally stacked against your success.

Thus, perhaps a good place to start when trying to understand what needs to go right to find sustained business success is to invert the question and look at what goes wrong first. Inversion allows us to change our perspective and look at business in a more novel way.

Fortunately in my twenty year career, I learned a lot about what to do by learning what not to do. Inadvertently, inversion has created a playbook that helped me take teams from chaos to value. From concept to shipping. From the edge of bankruptcy to sustained business success. What follows is that playbook — part case study and analysis — part tactical workbook, the reader can and (my hope is) follow these guidelines to find their own success in business. So let’s get into it.

In totality, what makes great companies sustainably great always comes down to the way they work to create meaningful, consistent, predictable, repeatable value. In my research four things are consistently true when outcomes are favorable: creativity, execution, judgment and humility.

… and in the interest of leaving you wanting more, stay tuned for a deep dive into each of these areas, once I refill my coffee.

I say this not to laude my accomplishments or to earn some level of credibility with my commentary but to say that a key part of Product Management is the art of looking at data and finding patterns that either your users, your customers, or your competitors may have missed… and when you apply this lens to how companies are run, and i’ve seen many, you really notice some things. Specifically things — values, cultural attributes, processes, and systems that are incredibly predictive of whether they will be successful or fail… or at best languish in mediocrity where practitioners moderate their aspirations from world-changing generational businesses to the proverbial “lifestyle business”.

Things that I just haven’t found in textbooks or “self-help-business” books… And in a selfish attempt to refine my thinking, challenge my thinking and document my thinking; it strikes me as a good idea to share my thinking. What follows is the written narrative of that journey. Published at infrequent intervals, with questionable grammar and ineloquent prose, but with a promise of substance and actual tactical tools and tips that anyone can implement and see results. Most importantly, friendly reader, look at this as in invation for discussion and debate. Do your part and i’ll do mine.

-yon

So take some time and first discuss with your stake holders exactly what you want your first PM role to be, heck even write it down… and use that basis as a means of recruiting. Then keep reading about what I generally look for (+/- specifics needed for the specific role and team). This list was generated from the comments and feedbacks of many other great product managers whom i’ve either admired, worked with, or been mentored by. I regret that I can’t credit them all explicitely. In retrospect i should have wrote it down:

• Ability to think creatively and outside the box. — and answer the question “Why” — always start with member and has a clear articulation of what problems the product is solving
• Inherent curiosity and a respect for creativity.
• Has a strong point of view — be stubborn with the vision, flexible with the details — Whenever faced with a need to press forwards in uncertain situations, she expresses a strong point of view but “holds it weakly”. This benefits everyone involved on a product, providing a default direction while suppressing over confidence and stimulating debate. Her strong view / weakly held shows up in the products she works on, which are described as opinionated rather than confused. She openly challenges her own assumptions through a dialectic process and invites others to do so as well. With sufficient evidence and data, she pivots to new ideas and concepts, restarting the cycle once again.
• Sets goals, measures, communicates clearly. She has a clear definition of success for any team and product she’s working on. These are goals that are aspirational (to help people dream), realistic (to keep people focused) and quantifiable (to help guide the way). They’re also shared goals — something the team fundamentally believes and wants to achieve. She tracks progress against these goals relentlessly but knows that metrics are only evidence of success, not success in itself.
• Capability to separate empathy from sympathy — in advocacy toward the customer (ie: a mature understanding that they are most likely not the customer they are advocating for)
• Is Data driven — Analytical bench and philosophy — ability to understand data to infer behavior and performance — both qualitative and quantitative — and now a days has the ability to access and process data on their own
• Ability and willingness to learn, work through uncertainty, and take risks when quantified . Thrives on change and ambiguity. Ability to interpret requirements from both qualitative and quantitative data
• Simplifies the Complex — Ability to break down complicated problems and work toward a solution or an answer
• Ability to prioritize and discern work between urgent and important, and important vs obvious. — “by doing everything, you fail at the most important thing”
• Ability to communicate to various audience types — responsible for informing and getting informed by stakeholders across the organization

I have yet to meet a PM who is a rock star at every one of these facets, but that is the joy in developing and building a PM team that in aggregate carries these characteristics.

so after nearly a decade of working in product management for businesses large to small and on products geared toward consumers to enterprises i’ve picked up quite a few tips and tricks.

after some prodding, by namely my sister, i’ve decided to share some of those learnings for your entertainment (perhaps even “education”). enjoy. share. comment. i look forward to hearing from all of you.

this post, ironically, will not be about products per say, but about users. the number one thing product managers need to remember is that it’s not about the product. every product manager needs to understand which users their product is geared toward and more importantly what problem of theirs does it solve.

ask any product manager this question and more often than not do you get a rambling list of features or capabilities as an answer. this should be your first cause for alarm. if you dont know who your user is and what problem they are solving, then by extension you will have a very difficult time of creating and delivering value — the essence of any great product is the value it creates.

the advice i give people is if you can’t answer these questions confidently and succinctly, start by answering the converse:

(1) Who are NOT your users?

(2) What problems are you NOT solving?

once you have these answers, before you start laying down code. take a few weeks and explore how you anticipate bringing your product to market. the go-to-market (as your product marketing brethren restlessly dream about) is often as important in execution as the actual product. reach out to your users with a prototype (fake or real) and explore how your users respond. use this data to understand the market opportunity size, competitive alternatives (or even non-competitive alternatives), why you can enter the market in a differentiated way and why now is the right time to enter the market?

put a written plan together on what success looks like and more importantly what metrics and goals demonstrate success (including how, if you chose to, will your product generate some money). take some time to define the critical factors that will lead to your success or the potential roadblocks you need to plan for. sometimes the best way to achieve this is to reach out to some non-competitive companies addressing the needs of a similar target group.

if you can answer all these questions, and still have confidence your product will be a hit, go for it. get maniacal about your execution. build build build. but, always remember your users.