Is Your “Innovation” Just Product Management in Disguise?

In the modern corporate lexicon, “innovation” is the ultimate buzzword. It’s slapped onto press releases, chanted in boardrooms, and used to describe everything from a new button color to a redesigned login page. Companies are desperate to be seen as innovators, pioneers on the cutting edge. But is this constant stream of updates and features truly innovation? Or are we dressing up solid, essential product management in a more glamorous outfit? This distinction is more than just semantics; it’s a critical strategic question. Mistaking one for the other can lead businesses down a path of incrementalism, leaving them vulnerable to true disruption. This article will explore the crucial differences and help you identify if your innovation engine is actually just a well-oiled product management machine.

Defining the core functions: Optimization vs. creation

At its heart, the confusion between product management and innovation stems from the fact that both aim to create value for customers. However, the nature of that value and the process to achieve it are fundamentally different.

Product management is the art and science of optimizing a known entity. It operates within an existing business model, serving an understood customer base with a defined product. A product manager’s world revolves around:

• Gathering feedback from existing users.
• Prioritizing features in a backlog to enhance the current experience.
• Managing a product roadmap for predictable, iterative improvements.
• A/B testing changes to increase metrics like engagement, conversion, or retention.

This work is vital. It sustains the business, keeps customers happy, and drives steady, predictable growth. It is about reducing risk and executing flawlessly on a known value proposition.

True innovation, on the other hand, is the pursuit of the unknown. It doesn’t just add a new floor to the building; it designs a new type of building altogether. Innovation is about creating net-new value, often by exploring new technologies, pioneering new business models, or solving a problem that customers don’t even know they have yet. It’s about creating new markets, not just serving existing ones better. This path is inherently risky, uncertain, and less about execution and more about discovery.

The mindset gap: Certainty and execution vs. uncertainty and discovery

The operational differences between these two functions are born from a deep-seated difference in mindset and culture. A company’s dominant mindset will dictate whether new ideas are nurtured or crushed.

The product management mindset thrives on certainty and execution. It uses data from the past to make informed decisions about the future. Success is measured with clear, established KPIs: Did revenue go up? Did churn go down? The process is linear and focused on delivering a high-quality, polished result on a predictable schedule. This is the mindset needed to run a stable, profitable business. It asks, “How can we do this better?”

Conversely, the innovation mindset must embrace uncertainty and discovery. When you are creating something truly new, there is no historical data to rely on. You have hypotheses, not facts. The goal isn’t to execute a flawless plan but to learn as quickly and cheaply as possible. Failure, in the form of a invalidated hypothesis, is not a setback but a valuable learning outcome. Success is measured by the speed of learning and the validation of core assumptions. This mindset asks, “Is this the right thing to build at all?”

When a culture of execution judges a project of discovery, the project is doomed. An early-stage innovation cannot show a positive ROI or a clear path to revenue, and it will be scrapped in favor of a “safer” feature update.

Are your improvements sustaining or disruptive?

To put this into practice, we can categorize improvements as either sustaining or disruptive. Most of what gets labeled “innovation” is actually sustaining innovation—another term for great product management. It’s about making a good product better for existing customers. Think of a smartphone manufacturer adding a better camera or a faster processor to its next model. It’s a valuable, necessary improvement, but it doesn’t change the market’s fundamentals.

Disruptive innovation is what creates new markets and transforms industries. It often starts by serving an overlooked niche before moving upmarket and displacing incumbents. A clear way to distinguish the two is to look at their core characteristics.

Why this distinction is critical for long-term survival

Failing to distinguish between product management and innovation has serious strategic consequences. If a company invests millions into an “innovation lab” but staffs it with product managers and judges it by product management metrics, it will only produce incremental improvements. True innovation will be starved of the unique conditions it needs to survive: patient capital, tolerance for failure, and autonomy from the core business’s processes.

This creates a dangerous blind spot. While the company is busy optimizing its current offerings, a competitor can emerge with a disruptive innovation that makes the entire business model obsolete. Blockbuster was excellent at product management—optimizing store layouts and managing inventory. Netflix, however, innovated the business model itself, first with DVDs-by-mail and then with streaming. Blockbuster’s incremental improvements were no match for Netflix’s disruptive change.

A balanced strategy requires both. You need world-class product management to fund the business today and a separate, protected engine for innovation to secure the business of tomorrow.

In conclusion, it’s clear that while product management and innovation are related, they are not the same. Product management is the crucial discipline of optimizing the known, driving predictable growth by making existing products better for existing customers. Innovation is the messy, uncertain, but vital search for the new—new business models, new markets, and new sources of exponential growth. Calling one the other isn’t just a marketing gimmick; it’s a strategic error. It sets the wrong expectations, applies the wrong metrics, and ultimately ensures that game-changing ideas never see the light of day. For a business to be truly resilient, it must master both: expertly managing the present while courageously building the future.

Image by: Connor Danylenko
https://www.pexels.com/@connor-danylenko-534256