Alex Moseman joined us on the podcast from Prophet, a leading innovation consulting company. Like many, Moseman started his career at a time when innovation wasn’t quite defined. “I don't even think I could have joined right into the innovation space the way you can these days,” he comments as he thinks back over his early career years.
Moseman had a very untraditional start as a studio musician who would occasionally help a friend with a small video editing bay for extra work. “That got me transitioned into really falling in love with the idea of what technology could do and how you can understand the fundamentals of how technology enables new ways to deliver capabilities and opportunities.”
Over the next several years, Moseman would work through a number of marketing, advertising, and product management positions both in-house and as a consultant. As he got more passionate about helping as many companies as possible innovate to their fullest potential, he was led to his position at Prophet.
Read on to learn two key points around innovation that Alex Moseman has learned over the course of his career and don’t forget to tune in to the full episode on the podcast.
Defining Good Product Management
How does someone become a strong product manager and what does good product management look like? Given the wide range of products on the market today, it’s pretty safe to assume that there isn’t one simple answer. “Product in general is a huge giant category,” Moseman shared. “I don't think there's a prototypical product manager.”
So how do we define what good product management means across a broad variety of industries? We think Moseman captured the definition well. “Good product management is about being able, specifically, to facilitate cross-functional teams to deliver great decisions, service of customer, and business value.”
With this in mind, it’s crucial to put the right leaders in charge of your product teams. “A good product manager ultimately must try to bring all organization capabilities together and deliver something better than the sum of the parts. So it really is about good vision.”
Trends in Innovation
What are the smartest ways that an organization can innovate, especially in today’s market? Moseman suggests thinking bigger than your tried and true revenue methods.”We can digitally transform the baseline and we can optimize some of the capabilities, but ultimately if you want to deliver in a very volatile market, you want to drive new revenue channels, new top line growth, and digital product especially is a great way to do that.”
Moseman encourages teams to find those new revenue channels and commit to them.
“Once you get there, that's the starting point of an innovation journey, because then you have to sustain it, scale it, and gain adoption of market. That's a threshold that moves depending on many, many factors.”
- Alex Moseman, Associate Partner + Global Head of Digital Product Management at Prophet
If you’re eager to make your own head-first dive into the innovation industry, be sure to contact Alex Pavlou to hear more about open roles and register with Bamboo Crowd for other opportunities and insights.
