Top Five Lessons Music Taught Me About Innovation
Source: David Yu
As some of you may be aware, I am a musician and music producer, going by the name of Peach Skies Music, my YouTube channel is here.
Music has shown me the mindset and approaches that are useful in innovation and I wanted to share these with you.
Experiment and embrace mistakes
One of my compositions, At Sea, had so many mistakes in it, but I was open to experimenting with sounds but the mistakes gave it some character and became part of the piece.
In music, particularly composition and jazz, we’re encouraged to try things out and see how they sound. This is similar in innovation, it’s great to have ideas, try them out and see how they resonate.
2. Let go of perfection and being judged
As a musician, I can feel vulnerable as I’m putting my heart and soul into a piece of music. It can feel similar for product managers and founders, putting everything into their creations. However, waiting until something is perfect before sharing means you’ll be doing it too late. Sharing and getting feedback on something not perfect and not caring about being judged means you get so much more from developing the innovation than if you’d built it and put it out to market and got feedback then.
3. Collaboration and team work
Musicians vibe with one another, encourage one another and bring their skills and experience to the band or session. It’s similar with innovation, collaboration and trusting each other’s contribution is important, is key to having strong team work in the development process.
4. Discipline, grit and Growth Mindset
Being a musician has taken decades of practicing, showing up for myself when I didn’t want to go to band practice or lessons, and doing a little bit of practice every day. Music takes discipline, grit to keep going and a growth mindset to learn and keep learning. In innovation, the same attributes are needed to keep showing up, be focused on developing the product and having a growth mindset to learn from the mistakes and experiments to learn what a good product looks like for customers.
5. Music is a product too
Although we may not like to think about it like that, but music is a product too. It’s developed with an audience (buyer/customre in mind). We’re thinking about their experience whilst listening to the music, the emotions that will be felt and who will be listening and become fans. Music and innovation are similar in that we need to consider the business aspect of not what works for the product and customer, but what works for the business or artist too.
Summary
If you want to learn more about my book which talks about experimentation, Make Products That Matter, head to Amazon and grab yourself a copy if you’re based in the UK or EU. It will become available from May 2024 in the US.
