Malte Scholz: Ideas and Execution Create Product Innovation
Airfocus Co-Founder and CEO Malte Scholz talks about what it takes to launch new capabilities that ensure product success.
By Tremis Skeete, for Product Coalition
Product innovation — a design and engineering approach that has become more important than the technologies that benefit from it. As simple as the concept sounds, our greatest companies and their products rely on it.
The digital product industry would not be where it is today without it, but even with product innovation — it has it’s dependencies.
Successful innovation relies on more than just dreams and ideas. To innovate, those dreams and ideas need to become real and tangible, and to make that happen, you need a critical technique — execution. That’s why the capability to execute on an innovative idea has become a key competitive advantage. Probably on par with “speed to market.”
Speaking of markets, let’s take a look at the product management platform market. Within it, there is no shortage of products and services that claim they can help you optimize the organization, productivity and efficiency of your product development team’s performance.
Companies are working to win the spot of “the best product management platform” in the hearts and minds of their customers. Among these competitors, there’s a company that seems to stand out for their capability to innovate effectively and quickly — Hamburg Germany based, Airfocus.
Airfocus offers a SaaS product designed to help product people perform roadmapping and prioritization tasks easier, with their signature collaborative environment and tools. Malte Scholz is the CEO (Chief Executive Officer) and CPO (Chief Product Officer).
To be the CEO and CPO requires an exceedingly high focus on innovation, and in a LinkedIn post, Malte talks about what he believes it takes to generate real product innovation.
With everything he mentioned in his post, we thought it would be great to break down what Malte recommends into a series of activities, which can lead to building and launching innovative ideas:
- Define the idea
- Perform Product Discovery
- Determine Product-Market-Fit
- Determine Product-User-Fit
- Organize and manage the product development process
- Work closely with cross-functional teams
- Keep iterating and developing the product
- Be involved in the go-to-market plan
- Ensure that resulting product meets customer needs
- Ensure that resulting product aligns with the overall business strategy
Airfocus has proven they can launch features that can initiate new ways to get things done and drive innovation, especially with their AI Assist service.
With AI Assist, according to an Airfocus announcement on ProductHunt.com, Malte says:
I’ve personally been using ChatGPT and NotionAI a lot — which is quite great btw — to help me get to first drafts (I’m very involved on the product marketing side), but I’m either not creative enough to come up with better prompts or these tools become unoriginal too quickly, especially when the product context is missing. This made me think it was time for a dedicated generative AI app for product managers.
Luckily, I have a great team by my side to make it happen.
With AI Assist we want product managers to be able to get to a PRD, problem statement, or new product idea with just a slash command. You can use it to analyze feedback sentiment, simplify complicated technical jargon, or just write faster. We wanted it to be easy, and we wanted it to be right where you work every day.
For this, we built a few PM-specific prompts that we found actually produce useful results. What started out as a “quick, three-day side project” (yes, rarely works, I know) ended up taking a month. It was worth it. We got to run it by experienced PMs, properly integrate it into our UI and decide on an original icon (I mean, who doesn’t like a 🪄 ?). 😜
And yes, it’s built on OpenAI. 😉
Most of all, though, we want it to be helpful to the product management community. That’s why we’re really, really excited to launch it here first to collect feedback and improve it further. Ultimately, we want you to be able to build better products.
When you read Malte’s ProductHunt statement, and his LinkedIn post, one can see how Airfocus successfully applied an effective philosophy for innovation.
In regard to his statement, from the moment when Malte and others like him took note of the problem and idea [1–4], then during the development process, built prompts designed for users based on test results [5–7], to requesting feedback via ProductHunt [8–10] — teams at Airfocus prove how real product innovation is done.
Note: Should you decide to adopt the above list into your work activities, please work with your team and/or stakeholders to define responsibilities and action steps within activity items 1–10.
With no intentions to oversimplify what a product manager does, as per Malte’s LinkedIn post, the product manager’s ultimate objective for innovation will never change — which is to make changes in established services by introducing new or improved ways of doing things.
Read a copy of Malte’s LinkedIn post below to find out more:
Ideas don’t make innovation. Executing them does.
This is where you, as a product manager, come in.
You diligently do discovery to ensure that the idea has product-market-fit or product-user-fit.
You work closely with cross-functional teams, to continue to iterate and develop the product.
You are hands-on in the go-to-market plan to make sure the product is successfully launched.
You don’t only manage the development process, but you are also responsible for ensuring that the resulting product meets customer needs and aligns with the overall business strategy.
And this already oversimplifies the work of a PM.
So the next time you have an innovative idea, remember it’s just the first step.
