Product Management: The Innovation Glue for the Lean Enterprise
At a time when organizations of all sizes both want and need innovation, exciting approaches including lean startup and agile development have risen to the forefront. Although there is no shortage of resources and expertise on these approaches, less guidance is available on the daunting challenge of introducing and increasing innovation in our organizations. Organizations of different sizes face different challenges in innovation which, if not dealt with, end up stifling the potential results. Mimi Hoang and George Schlitz share experiences from many years of successes and failures introducing and increasing innovation in diverse companies. Mimi and George explore the difference between the challenges that startups and big companies face increasing innovation and how product management can help overcome them. They share innovation killers, give top insights on how to be successful, and present participants with an assessment they can take back to their own workplaces.
Mimi Hoang is the Senior Director, Emerging Products at Autodesk where she oversees global development and product management of products covering the architecture, manufacturing, and construction industries. With more than twenty years of experience in software, technology, and product, Mimi has held senior management positions at Symantec, JP Morgan, Ernst & Young, and MBNA America. She has worked at both startups and large corporations, bringing new products to market and growing mature products in the consumer, SMB, and enterprise segments.
For more than ten years, George Schlitz has been helping companies introduce new approaches—agile methods, lean thinking, continuous improvement, theory of constraints, lean startup, and more. George has helped diverse-sized companies and industries—from late startups to large enterprises, from gaming and entertainment to manufacturing and financial services. His background includes roles as a program/project manager, build and configuration manager, and programmer. Co-founder of the agile coaching company BigVisible Solutions, George now focuses on guiding leaders and teams in their attempts to help their companies thrive in today’s complexity.