Review Your Portfolio - Product Discovery Methods

🔵 Empathize phase & ✅ Define phase & ⭐️ Ideate phase & 🔴 Prototype phase & 💜 Test phase

Sustaining/incremental innovations and disruptive innovations are what make up your innovation portfolio. Reviewing where various concepts fall in the portfolio helps you understand where to focus your energy.

How to review your portfolio

Create a simple 2×2 matrix. Plot “depth of insight” on the x-axis, from shallow to deep. Shallow insights are things the team knew before the project started. Deep insights expose the problem in a brand new light.

Plot “disruptiveness of concept” on the y-axis, from incremental to breakthrough. Incremental concepts are simple builds on existing products or services (or things the organization has tried before). Breakthrough concepts have never been tried—they might even be new to the industry.

It’s easier to move a deep insight up to breakthrough territory than it is to move a shallow insight. When reviewing your portfolio, ask “which concepts address problems we’ve never considered?” These concepts are easier to “Yes, And!” into breakthrough territory.

Credit

design thinking bootleg by d.school at Stanford University