Seems like forever since I've posted, I must be a busy product manager.
Was watching TV the other night and came across a military special around Skunk Works, the Lockheed group responsible for bringing many cutting-edge aircraft to market in very short time frames.
If you look up Skunk works on Wikipedia, we find:
"a group within an organization given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, tasked with working on advanced or secret projects."
It occured to me that if they could design and build such complicated products in such a short amount of time, why couldn't product management do the same?
Now, I'm not suggesting we ignore all our policies and bureaucracy, as I'm fairly certain Lockheed had a bit more budget then most of us, and likely far less oversight:)
What I am pondering, is whether or not launching small skunk works projects for innovation could work. Why not take a small cross-functional team and work with some clients on advanced themes, develop prototypes and generally follow a very agile approach.
Would be interested to hear some thoughts from the community, then again, if your running true skunk works, its probably a secret and you can't tell me.
When I was at TI in the early 90's, we did some of that. In practice, the R&D part was pretty free-flowing, and then when something appeared to be viable, it got caught in the sludge of re-integrating with the rest of the group. Still faster than never leaving the sludge pit.
Tom Peters wrote about this a lot in The Search for Excellence. He talked about Lockheed, 3M, and others I don't remember.
I think the software analog might be a product manager with a scrum team, and an exec sponsor with a "figure out a solution to problem X" charter. I've talked to a couple potential clients who wanted to avoid diluting the focus of their existing teams (on operations, current roadmap, etc), who were looking for ways to bring in a team that can operate outside of the corporate procedures to make stuff happen. Then the only bottleneck is the exec's attention.
I think this type of "project" is becoming more normal. Yahoo has an incubator type program called Brickhouse. http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/03/14/salim-ismail-to-head-yahoo-brickhouse/
Obviously the challenge is finding the revenue to fund something like this. But one must wonder, isn't this type of skunk works project the one true example of R&D.