They reverse-engineered their success into a five-step process: 1) Eliminate friction, 2) Entertain always, 3) Experiment constantly, 4) Engage deeply (one-on-one moments), and 5) Empower the team. This provides a structured framework for building a passionate community around any product or service.

Building delightful products isn't guesswork. A four-step process involves: 1) identifying functional and emotional user motivators, 2) turning them into opportunities, 3) ideating solutions and classifying them, and 4) validating them against a checklist for things like inclusivity and business impact.

Elf Beauty CEO Tarang Amin practices a "zero distance" policy by engaging directly with customers on TikTok Live. After being "terrorized" by user requests for a new product, he overruled an 18-month timeline and launched it in just six months, showing how direct community feedback can radically accelerate a product pipeline.

A vision should be aspirational to inspire teams. To make it feel achievable, ground it with a product strategy that outlines concrete progress through testable hypotheses each year. The strategy translates the moonshot vision into actionable steps.

Don't censor ideas early. The path to innovative marketing is generating a high volume of unconventional, even "bad," ideas. Most will fail, but the one or two that succeed can become massive multipliers for your brand, often requiring you to ask for forgiveness, not permission.

Effective creation is not a linear process but a continuous cycle. Start with chaotic ideas, apply strategic constraints to create a tangible asset, and then use the feedback and new questions from your audience—the 'new chaos'—to fuel the next iteration or creation.

Elf's CEO joins TikTok Live sessions where he is directly lobbied by the community for new products. He uses this "zero distance" feedback to bypass traditional R&D, personally pushing his innovation team to fast-track product development from 18 months down to six.

To build a 'fearless innovation' culture, Snap-on's innovation director spends the vast majority of his time on-site with customers, not in corporate headquarters. This radical commitment to direct observation and ethnographic research ensures the entire innovation pipeline is grounded in real-world user problems.

Nubar Afeyan argues that companies should pursue two innovation tracks. Continuous innovation should build from the present forward. Breakthroughs, however, require envisioning a future state without a clear path and working backward to identify the necessary enabling steps.