Insights & Blog

Value Stream Discovery | LinkedIn Audio Event Special

A product’s value stream provides an opportunity for organizations to identify inefficiencies, redundancy, bottlenecks, and other types of waste in their processes. Unlike most company cost-cutting efforts, mapping, analyzing, and improving the value stream leads to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, reduced costs, and increased profitability, without sacrificing value creation.

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Value Stream Discovery - Part I

Value streams are all the activities an organization does to create value for customers and other stakeholders (usually within a specific product). “Lean” practitioners help you map your workflows, so you can see how to improve them while maintaining value creation. But what if the value isn’t there? Or you’re creating a new product? Or “innovating?”

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Value Stream Discovery - Part 2

The Value Stream Discovery Loop is a customer-centric approach to value creation. It helps businesses understand what their customers need and how they can provide value to them in an efficient, value-enhancing way. At its core, this is accomplished by looking at a customer’s lifecycle journey from their perspective.

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The Rise of Product Management | LinkedIn Audio Event Special

Tracing the origin and evolution of Product management to understand how we got here and what's next to continue to drve business impact.

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The Rise of Product Management

People often aren’t conscious of their needs or how to address them. This explains why we buy a lot of things we don’t need. Because of this, if one wants to create value in the world, it’s up to product managers to understand needs. In other words, they shouldn’t be asking customers what they want or asking them to predict how they might behave in the future. 

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The Rise of Product Management - Part II

The pandemic marked a point of acceleration for corporate digital transformation. The companies that performed the best were digital or had at least adopted a digital age mindset. These organizations are now living in a world where the product is never done and their systems, structures, and processes must reflect that. The product management function is the right group to design, test, and iterate upon those systems.

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The Rise of Product Management

Product Management has been a discipline in the business world for several decades. However, it has become increasingly important with the acceleration of digital transformation in large businesses. As organizations continue to adapt to advancements in technology, and increasingly incorporate digital solutions into their products, Product Management will be a critical part of product success and innovation. Product Management will help organizations understand what their customers need and create new products and services that meet those needs for both the short and long term. The Product Management function leads the way in the human side of digital transformation.

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How Innovation Labs Must Evolve

The future of successful innovation labs is NOT to take on the responsibility of invention or figuring out new business models that will disrupt their industry. Rather, it is to become a “center of excellence” for supporting an “innovation mindset” throughout the organization.

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Re-think Your Next Re-org

Companies not hitting their targets or attempting to achieve some type of transformation, such as cultural, digital, or agile, are all potential reasons for reorganizing portions of the company. Whatever the reason, the method is often NOT geared towards achieving the desired outcomes. The reality is that the re-org of today tend to focus on cost-cutting and “efficiency” instead of asking the more serious question: “what structure will facilitate and incentivize the behavior we need?”

It should be seen as a chance to re-think and re-align the company’s structure, culture, and mission. In this way, it makes for an amazing work environment where people will be happy to contribute, leading to increased retention and more engaged employees. which in turn will generate the results the organization is hoping for.

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Innovation Labs into Center for Excellence - LinkedIn Event Special

In this episode, NYT bestselling author and founder of Moves The Needle, Brant Cooper goes over the common errors associated with innovation labs and the real pivot they need to make in order to survive their 3-5 year lifespan. 

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Reducing Uncertainty Within Your HR Dept via Explore in the Core

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Turning Your Innovation Lab into a Center of Excellence

Innovation labs have expertise but it's not invention. They excel at exploration work, and exploration is the solution for how companies should deal with uncertainty.
Therefore, we should be turning the innovation lab into a source that can drive exploration using KASE (Kickstart, Accelerate, Scale, Endure).

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How to Discover Opportunities within Your Business - part II

Opportunity discovery is the practice of figuring out where a business can find new growth. It’s the phase that comes before customer discovery and before product idea. (You can actually start with either of those, but should take a big stop backward to figure out more about the actual opportunity.)

There are 4 parts to opportunity discovery. In this episode, we'll be going over these 4 parts and the process of finding said opportunities.

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Creating Effective KPI's

We optimize what we measure, since if you measure the right things then humans will naturally adapt to optimizing them. History shows us, for example, if you measure innovation by the number of ideas or the number of patents, that’s what you get–ideas and patents. If you wanted something else, you should have measured something else. So how do you identify the right metrics? If you want to truly digitally transform your company, you need to start with the basics: focusing on the data that indicates progress towards outcomes -- Progress Impact Metrics (PIM).

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