Step-click. Step-click. Step-click. Step-click. Step-click.

At the top of the steps I paused, and balancing on my crutches for a second, surveyed the Caltrain platform. In front of me was the one crosswalk where pedestrians could cross from one side (trains headed south to San Jose) to the other (trains headed north to San Francisco, which is where I need to go). But which side was which? There was not a sign in sight.

So I started crutch-walking the 200 yards or so to the other end of the platform where people were waiting. I’m pretty good on crutches but it’s still slow-going: step-click, step-click, step-click. I get three-quarters of the way to the other side of the platform and there is a sign: San Jose (Southbound). Oh no!

Now I have the information I need to make my decision - oh, but there’s no crosswalk here, I have to turn around and go back to where I started to cross over. By the time I had navigated back to the crosswalk, crossed to the other side of the platform, and started towards the ticket machines, I had missed my train.

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You had a great idea and you’ve worked hard and built it into something real, something that you’re confident has value and utility. You launch it and you’re on top of the world… until you realize no one’s using it. Visitors to your site - and there aren’t many - trickle away without realizing what they’re missing

Last weekend, I presented a talk at Startup Camp called “Why should I use your product?” It came from my experience with TechCrunch and other industry blogs, reading a write-up of a new service, clicking over, and then seeing nothing to explain why I should try it out.

Most early-stage startups don’t have in-house expertise in user experience or marketing, and that’s the right call for them. But I realized as I was talking that my tips for them can be every bit as applicable for product managers within larger companies. Having full teams in user research, design, or marketing doesn’t necessarily mean that those resources are accessible for day-to-day projects. In an ideal world, you’d probably have an experienced marketer survey your users; you’d probably have a Photoshop whiz design your homepage - in your world, do with what you got.

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It’s an absolute mistake to think that art is not practical - or that business cannot be creative. The best artists are extraordinarily practical…they make use of everything they have at their disposal.

I just read an interview with Twyla Tharp in Harvard Business Review and found myself wanting to highlight practically everything she says.

In my experience, there are two big forces driving product success. Both are hard to pin down, but I’d roughly describe them as “business savvy, knowing the market, having the right focus” and “creativity, problem solving, identifying the open spaces and finding interesting ways to fill them.” They overlap, as you can tell. The latter is often called Innovation, and as a product management practitioner I read a lot of articles about it. I do not walk away from those articles wanting to highlight much in them.

There’s no secret to fostering creativity in a product management organization, and there’s no process that you can neatly clip out and import into your team to turn them into Innovation machines. It’s kind of like losing weight - it’s a series of habits, done daily, reinforced, stuck to even under duress. It’s hard to start but it gets easier. It comes easier to some people than others, but listen to Twyla:

…I don’t like using genetics as an excuse - “I can’t do this because I don’t have that particular genetic gift.” Get over yourself. The best creativity is the result of habit and hard work.

So how do you start building the creative habit in your product management organization? And what can we hope to gain from this?

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