As the INSIDER Guide to New Product Development (NPD), I am constantly keeping and eye out for information. Here is my “Five on Friday” list for May 1st, featuring the five best trends, tips, quotes or stats from my reading this week. I hope they provide good food for thought for your teams and products!:
Our first two items are great tips from one CMO article Six Ways To Help Your Marketing Team Innovate from April 23, 2015, by Thomas Barta:
1. Fight Well
“ the most productive teams knew how to have a good fight. These teams passionately debated ideas, used facts, avoided personal conflict, respected others, and rallied around common goals. Teams that didn’t know how to have a good fight got into personal arguments, shut ideas down, explored only a few routes, and were ultimately less productive and innovative.”
2. Fight With Facts
“To innovate better, the team used colors to label their arguments in emails (e.g. white for facts, green for ideas, and red for emotions). This shift forced everyone to stick to facts and ideas and avoid negative emotion (positive emotions were okay).”
3. Your Site of Sites
Found this site called Startup Stash that I recommend you bookmark. It’s a curated site of free/inexpensive tools for growing businesses. Tools are grouped in categories from Legal (create your site T&Cs) to Project Management (featuring one of my favorites, Basecamp, to plan and manage product roadmaps) to Deployment (GitHub, Wercker, Deploy to collaborate on code creation or deploy to multiple servers).
4. Now – You Gotta Be Mobile (Optimized)
Many thanks to Bluehost for reminding me of the April 21st change to Google Search. At that time Google expanded the preferential ranking given to sites that are mobile-optimized. As Bluehost says, “ having a mobile-friendly website is no longer a nice option it’s absolutely essential.”
Is your site ready? It’s easy to find out; just click here. As many of you know, we just moved (and rebranded) Subscription Insider to a new platform last week. That was really just 1.0 of the move, the site will be fully mobile optimized very soon – a top priority!
5. Magazine Media 360 Factbook – the News on Newsweeklies
Worried the newsweekly vertical is played out? According to the MFA 360 Report, the category grew a healthy 15.4% from 2013 to 2014. The biggest growth channel? You guessed it – mobile web, from 16% to 29% of the total brand audience. See the entire study here.
Have a great weekend!
— Diane
Diane Pierson, our INSIDER Guide to New Product Development, is a leader in product management and marketing, having delivered results to companies including Dun & Bradstreet, LexisNexis, American Lawyer Media and Copyright Clearance Center. She has built products & services that have delivered over $100 million in revenue and knows what works, and what doesn’t, when executing product plans and strategies. (Read Diane’s full Bio)