In established businesses, leaders and employees assume the blueprint they use to execute on the business is fixed. But as the last few years demonstrate, little is fixed. Pandemic, war, supply chain issues, ransomware attacks, inflation–it’s crazy out there! All these events ripple across the business landscape, disrupting the markets. The blueprint maybe doesn’t work anymore.
How do you fix that?
we need to double down on understanding our customers deeply in order to build products that provide value. Old market research techniques just aren’t effective in the face of massive uncertainty. Product managers should be out doing this. Designers should be out doing this. Engineers should be going along for the ride. Build exploration into your regular work to improve efficiency of execution. Running experiments helps reduce risk and waste, not to mention that it provides real-world data to enable high-confidence decision-making.
On this episode of Disruption Proof, we're discussing uncertainty in the market and how to go about it. The default nature of a new business is . There is no blueprint yet for building, marketing, selling and delivering new value for customers. The first step is (or ought to be) understanding the market needs. This requires interviewing potential customers and running experiments all before building any of it. In this episode, you'll learn how to undergo this exploration.
This episode covers how you can properly 'survey' your customers so you can better understand them. We often lead customers on and are looking for confirmation bias when making decisions. Brant Cooper, NYT bestselling author and founder of Moves The Needle will go through how to properly pull data and make customer-centric decisions.
This podcast covers, what is opportunity discovery and what it means to find new opportunities within your organization.
Unlike Horizon Planning where projects are prioritized based on "level of innovation" and "time to ROI", Visibility Planning is based on evidence. In other words, we estimate the likelihood of achieving desired outcomes and when, based on market data and insights. We measure progress toward desired outcomes, which determines the time horizon.
What if your portfolio planning included visibility? With Moves The Needle's Prioritization Tool you can identify ideas that require exploration as well projects that should be funded because they are high impact with high evidence of success.
The current model of horizon planning has diverged from its original thesis. Instead of focusing on growth or new revenues, it has been molded into three time horizons based on "level of innovation." The fundamental problems with this model is two-fold. First, true innovation is unpredictable, so you can't lay it out on a time horizon. Second, growth can come from numerous places, not just "innovation". Where is not determined by the tine horizon or the model itself. Companies that prioritize their projects based on the incorrect assumption of "time to ROI" clearly means an inefficient allocation of resources.
When you scale based upon functions, you are likely reinforcing silos. You end up cascading tasks that one hopes align with organizational priorities.
Mission-based organization of the company, rather than carving work up based upon function is more impactful. In the end, most teams will look the same, as if they were carved up by function, but only because the mission dictates that. In other words, if a team has a mission that requires building particular software product functionality, the team will likely be composed of all software developers. On the other hand, if a mission requires a team to investigate what functionality will increase customer engagement, functions other than developers would be required. Learn how Moves The Needle has helped companies with mission-based organization.
Do companies know how to innovate? Should innovation be part of an individual’s job title? Should it be in a job description? Does a company even need to innovate? Most big companies think technology when thinking about innovation, regardless of whether or not they’re technology companies. Startups are often considered to be de facto innovators, but is that the case?
Steve Portigal, Author, Speaker, and Customer Research Expert, shares how to drive innovation using the power of strategic customer insights. He reminds us that learning from customers is “messy” because we are complex beings. In order to go deep while interviewing customers you should have clarity about what is uncomfortable for you and what is uncomfortable for customers and not conflate the two. His provocation “No One Cares” highlights the risk of magnifying the significance of our solutions in a customer’s life and missing the opportunity to focus on things that customers care about.
Katie Hanson, Director of Product Management at Benefitfocus, shares how her company quickly adapted to help their customers find affordable benefits during this global pandemic and how it led to the creation of a new offering. She also talks about the importance of supporting her team during these stressful times by understanding how they are “really” doing.
In today’s episode we’re excited to have Sonja Kresojevic, the VP of Product Lifecycle at Pearson. In the episode we cover:
- How teams leverage the product lifecycle framework to focus on the right things at the right time.
- How Pearson funds different early stage projects based on stage specific criteria and metrics.
- How Pearson has scaled lean innovation throughout the business and created a culture that enables innovation.
In the episode, we dive into how BEA Systems, a multinational aerospace, defense, and information security company has organized their innovation strategy into 4 operational buckets and how they not only identify new products but innovate on the core business.
We also talk about how they have done a fantastic job getting rid of the distance between the end customer and new product development teams amongst other things.
In this episode we interview Simon at Spotify and cover how Spotify manages “bets," strategic decision making and execution with Spotify Rhythm
and more! He also shares how The Library Corporation coped with the disruption of library’s, how The Library Corporation introduced Lean Startup into their organization, and why the part time initiative model isn’t conducive to innovation
