The Hired Guns’ newest blogger, Matt Smith, is an expert at developing new products, innovative thinking, and startups. He’ll be putting his knowledge to good use for us as he writes about product management and methods to help companies innovate effectively, especially in an Agile environment. Matt sees his mission as “helping people grow, fostering ideas, and solving complicated problems in an innovative way.” We wanted to find out more . . . .

The Stats:

Hometown:
Newton, Mass.

Current ‘hood:
Upper West Side, NYC

College/Grad School:
Union College

Current Job:
Director, New Products & Innovation at Shutterstock

Where do you plan to take your column this year?
I really want to focus on success by innovation. Specifically how being Agile, in both product development and in business operations, can lead to innovation and, ultimately, success.

What do you hope to accomplish with your Hired Gun posts?
I’d like to help people understand innovation; how to find the open spaces within a business or industry, and fill them. Ultimately what we as product people are here to do is figure out how to help people, how to solve problems, and make people’s lives easier. At our core, we’re innovators. Or course, that’s much easier said than done.

Not everyone understands how to innovate, how to fill those gaps, and how to do it successfully. I’m writing these posts to help people learn and how to succeed.

Who should be checking you out?
Everyone from a new product person to a CEO who is looking to understand how to bring Agile to his or her business so that it can operate and innovate quickly and successfully.

There is a right way and a wrong way to be Agile, and it’s a slippery slope. When done the right way, Agile can help a company be incredibly successful, but when done wrong, it can really hurt a company. People who want to understand the right way to be innovative through Agile should be checking me out.

What makes you an authority on the subject?
I’m currently focused on new products and innovation at Shutterstock, the world’s largest subscription-based image library. Additionally, I’ve helped several companies grow from a handful of employees to well into the hundreds, and at any given time, I’m working with one or two startups to help with their innovation, long-term planning, and product strategy—all through Agile means.

And, as any true entrepreneur should, I am working on my own startup during nights and weekends with a few friends.

What do you wish you knew at 25 that you now know.
The one thing I wish I knew at 25 that I know now is the same thing I tell the 25-year-olds that I work with: “You don’t know nearly as much as you think you do.” So much of being a great product person is experience; you need the experience of failure, of your CEO grilling you for revenue numbers and usage, of users telling you that your product is unusable, and ultimately of what success really looks like when compared to utter failure.

What’s the last job you want to have before you retire? And why? How do you think you’re going to get there?
I’d love to end up as an angel investor or an “entrepreneur-in-residence” at a venture-capital firm.

It sounds a little obvious, and potentially a bit clichéd, but for me it’s not about the money, it’s about helping people grow, fostering ideas, and solving complicated problems in an innovative way. As to how I get there, I mean, it’s as hard a road to get to as any, but my goal is to continue to help companies and individuals understand innovation and success through Agile means, start my own company, and keep communication at the forefront of everything I do.

Where do you plan on living when you ultimately do retire?
I’m going to have to have two places, I don’t think I could be in just one place. I love the chaos of a city like New York, but I need to be able to escape it as well. Ultimately I’ll be somewhere where I can think to myself, with a view and lots of land, but close enough to a city so I can drive in and be surrounded by strangers.

Best career advice somebody gave you that you now live by?
My father told me a story when I was young, and the point of the story is something that I definitely live by. It’s advice that I pass on to as many people as I can: always break things down. The buildings in New York, as massive and impressive as they are, are built one floor at a time. The point is, that when you look at something in its entirety, sometimes it seems overwhelming, but if you step back and break things down, it becomes manageable.

What’s your passion outside of work?
I have a background in visual art and English literature, so I’m always carrying my camera with me and snapping photos, writing observations about things I see (so that I can add them to a piece of fiction I’m working on), or doodling in my notebook. I’m always trying to scratch my creative itch, either in business or my art.

You mention in your bio that you focused on “breaking things down to simple ideas” to help understand their value. Could we get an example or two of how this might play out?
There are opportunities for this every day. I remember working on a project a few months ago, and walking into a room where a few folks had been locked in a heated battle for hours, discussing every possible situation where a user would get an error, and making sure that they had “handling” in place—notifications, ribbons, undo statements, redo statements, etc. What they were doing was wasting time, and ultimately over-engineering the product.

Their “aha” moment came when I gave them some advice that a former colleague of mine had given me years before: “Let’s design the workflow so that the user never gets into these error states—it will make the experience better and the interface cleaner.” The minute I said it, they had the same look on their faces that I had years prior; it was the “Ugh, obviously—I can’t believe we just wasted that much time” look.

Another example that I can speak to, is starting a new business (either a new company or a new product within an existing company). A few months ago, I was asked by a friend to help launch a new business line, an offshoot of their core business. In our first meeting, he had handed me some basic research that was scattered and unfocused.

He had reached out to a handful of potential users, which is exactly the type of research one should do in the very beginning, but he was struggling because of one small adjustment he failed to make. Instead of asking what you’d like in this product, he needed to ask, “What do you need?” There are hundreds of things that people would like in products, but ultimately there are only a handful of things that they really need when push comes to shove. In making this change, we went from a list of about 25 features that he thought he was going to have to build to about five. It went from a six-month project to a two-month one. Making a simple change like this reduces the scope of the project and allows you to go from a massive project to a much more manageable one. If those things that you ended up not having in the initial release are really showstoppers, your audience will let you know when they start using your product.

What blogs and sites do you personally find the most inspirational—or just fun? I’m always reading Fred Wilson’s AVC, Techcrunch, Smashing magazine, mashable.com, Eric Ries’ Lessons Learned and a handful of other sites. All of these sites keep me up-to-date on design, solutions, etc, and how other folks operate. For instance, Eric Ries has done an amazing job of creating a thriving community around the notion of a Lean startup, and it’s not only educational for me, but inspirational as well.