You're facing market disruptions. How can you tweak your tech strategies for success?

Disrupt yourself, or someone else will. If you're in charge of a successful company's strategy, you should assume that you're facing disruption all the time. Build a team whose sole job is to find ways to disrupt each of your company's successful offerings. Enable this team to run with ideas and validate them in market under a different brand. Take the validated ideas, make them part of your product strategy, and launch them in a controlled way. Your existing offerings will be disrupted, but this is the only way you'll be able to control how and when the disruption happens.

Facing market disruptions? First, rethink your business strategy before tweaking tech plans. If the market is disrupted, pivot your business and align your tech with the new outcomes either at the core of your products or as an enabler. If your tech is disrupted, it's time to embrace new trends. For future success, shift from yearly strategy cycles to quarterly strategy sprints. Talk to your customers and implement sensors for real-time data and insights. Remember, sensors don’t replace conversations—co-create with your customers. Establish regular customer boards and use design thinking for ideation and validation. Engage them in rapid prototyping to stay ahead. Adapt quickly, stay close, and let their feedback shape your strategies.

The very first step is to understand the magnitude and the speed of the disruption. If the disruption is something that is a major change in the assumptions or the risk factors tied to your strategy, then you need to act quickly. The same goes for disruption that is going to have. immediate consequences on your assumptions or risk factors.. You have to clearly understand the disruptions.

They can also include: 1. Competition from new entrants offering innovative products or services 2. The need to invest in developing and adopting new technologies. 3. Potential loss of market share due to changing customer preferences.

Another important addition to it is the utilization of frameworks like Scrum or Kanban, which facilitate iterative development and regular feedback loops. By breaking down projects into manageable tasks and allowing for frequent reassessment, organizations can better align their products and services with evolving market demands. This process definitely accelerates time-to-market.

Here are 8 ways to embrace agility when there's market disruptions: 1. Understand Changes: Assess the impact of market changes on your business. 2. Evaluate Market Demand: Determine current and future customer needs. 3. Analyze Competitors: Predict how competitors might respond. 4. Assess Tech & Processes: Regularly evaluate and update your technology & processes, as applicable. 5. Adopt Agile Methodologies: Implement practices that increase flexibility and responsiveness. 6. Leverage Real-Time Data: Use data analytics for quick, informed decision-making. 7. Invest in Innovation: Continuously explore and adopt cutting-edge technologies. 8. Upskill Teams: Train your team to adapt and thrive given the market changes.

If you set up your strategy correctly, you are already measuring both leading and lagging indicators through an automated dashboard. This ability to automatically analyze both leading and lagging KPIs will be very useful to understand if there are trends or this is a one off behavior. If you have enough data and have the skills, you can run the data through an AI tool to make predictions of where the market is headed.

Reward innovation and learning whether or not it's "successful" Treat everything like an R&D project or Market research. It's all a test and we're learning together This must come from company leadership and must be 100% genuine. Full stop. Employees need to feel psychologically safe to take real risks to innovate. We are all incredibly finely tuned to detect lies. If leadership isn't genuinely, passionately focused on the organizational learning and innovation no matter what, people will see through it. And if they detect it isn't safe they will fall back into safe, CYA projects that aren't as innovative. Leadership's genuine focus on innovation and learning and rewarding even failure is essential to foster innovation.

The only consistent thing in life is change. So when you're thinking about your strategy, you have to remember that your customers are changing, your competition is changing, and even your company is changing by the mere fact that it's trying to execute a strategy. Therefore, it's in your best interest to check on the strategy, the key assumptions, and the risks factors on a regular basis. This doesn't mean check on them on a daily basis, but checking on them once a year is not effective. Find your own rhythm.