The art of war for Intrapreneurs, Product Managers, and Initiative Leads

A friend who is a serial entrepreneur and I, have been discussing the challenges our target users face. Through these conversations, I have always felt that my friend trivializes the challenges that Intrapreneurs/PMs/Initiative Leads in large organizations confront in their entrepreneurial journey. In his words, these concerns are never as existential or linked to a feeling of personal failure.

Other entrepreneurs also believe that it is easier to be an entrepreneur inside a large organization than building your startup from scratch. After all, a large organization comes with deep pockets, an established sales machinery, and a brand name that you can ride on.

I cannot say that these beliefs are always correct.

This article talks about some challenges in recruitment, budgeting, approvals, stakeholder alignment, user research, sales and marketing, and community support unique to Intrapreneurs/PMs/Initiative Leads in large organizations, aka WARRIORS. If you are a warrior Intrapreneur/PM/Initiative Lead, please read on and share some more tips for overcoming these challenges. If you are not a warrior, these challenges might come as a surprise to you or seem like a rant.

Stakeholder alignment 

Stakeholder alignment is probably the most talked-about challenge of warrior Intrapreneurs/PMs/Initiative Leads. Warriors usually have many stakeholders who belong to departments and levels across the company, expect different things from the initiative, and often have no experience with Agile ways of working.

Sometimes warriors might not even realize that some senior leaders have a stake in their initiative until it is too late.

Let us talk about some tips for getting the maximum support from your stakeholders. It helps to start every new initiative with as many meetings with stakeholders as you can get, preferably one on one. These conversations are the best time to ask questions about your initiative's genesis, picture of success, key supporters, and likely pitfalls. This process will help you map out your stakeholders (and a lot else!). Remember that not all stakeholders require the same level of involvement at all points of your project. Be mindful of who you need to work closely with, who would like to stay informed and give feedback, and who would like to be heard.

These early meetings are also an excellent forum for educating your stakeholders about the agile process you will follow and how that would look. There is a ton of great material already available on working with stakeholders that are new to Agile, for example - https://dzone.com/articles/10-proven-stakeholder-communication-tactics-during

External recruitment 

Recruitment is the bane of a warrior's life. This challenge, more than any other constraints, can impede warriors.

The skills required for building an excellent product are not often available in-house, while new headcount approvals need to be obtained up to a year in advance. In some cases, you might even have the budget and the headcount approval, but the title you are hiring for may not be a part of your budget approval, or for that matter, an approved title in the HR lexicon.

The best short-term fix for this is to rely on outsourced resources billed as a variable cost, at least in the early days of your initiative. Getting a few generic titles approved each year could also help - for example, Content Lead, Design Lead, and Tech Lead.

The long-term solution to recruitment woes and most other approval related problems is to advocate for more autonomy and simpler processes for warriors and their teams. That level of decentralization does not come naturally to a large organization, especially in highly regulated industries. Still, it could be the key to innovating as fast as the insurgents disrupting your industry.

Internal recruitment 

Hiring from within the organization is another beast altogether.

Star internal resources usually jump at the opportunity of working with warriors, but convincing future teammates is not the battle here. 

Internal recruitment involves bearing the department’s wrath from which you are poaching a star resource and navigating the internal HR guidelines on such transfers.

The best option is to get resources from departments that support your initiative. You could also leverage senior stakeholders to negotiate rotational staffing from other departments. Remember that digital or new initiatives opportunities can put star resources on a steep learning curve and increase the retention rate.

Budgeting 

A recurring theme in all of this is going to be the budgeting process. Funds allocated to a warrior project could have nothing to do with the project’s growth in the current financial year or the achievement of milestones.

Warriors often go through an annual budgeting exercise like the rest of the organization.

They must present fund requirements with detailed plans of what they want to do with it over the next year of their "Agile" initiative.

Any deviation from this involves many rounds of explanations. Innovation budgets are also the first to be cut back if a crisis hits.

The best workaround is to try to break down the budgeting period and advocate for milestone-based tranches every quarter. In exchange, ask for the agility to plan detailed spending by quarter vs. annually. Note that this could be a risky move if the organization hits a liquidity crunch mid-year, say due to a global pandemic.

Here is a good article that talks about building feedback loops for funding agile projects - https://www.bain.com/insights/how-to-plan-and-budget-for-agile-at-scale/

Sales and marketing

Access to an established sales and marketing machinery does not always guarantee natural tailwinds for external sales. The warriors’ target audience or target channel might differ from that of the parent business.

Even if these match, it might not always be straightforward for warriors to convince and train their existing sales and marketing teams to push a new product with a different value proposition and lower incentives versus popular or proven products.

 What if the target audience is inside your organization? That should indeed be a cakewalk. After all, the company has invested in the product because it improves employees’ and/or customers’ lives. Plus, the target audience is captive. And yet, the most common question we at Ignite get asked is–"How can I increase internal adoption of my product/solution?”

Adoption problems are rarely a problem of adoption alone.

These could be linked to a lack of focus on the needs of one or more of the three critical entities - salesforce, buyers, and users. If there is a conflict among the needs of these three groups of stakeholders, prioritize the users. Otherwise, you are building for all three.

Low adoption could also be linked to your solution’s incompatibility with these entities’ current behavior, an inability to iterate quickly based on their feedback, etc. Involving salesforce, buyers, and users early can address some of these challenges and get buy-in from the likely first adopters.

Assuming that you have ruled out such product issues as the primary drivers of low adoption, shifting gears to internal marketing and training can help. The fundamentals here are the same as external marketing–enrolling influencers, using channels that your audience frequents, and designing a simple and compelling value proposition. You could also consider having an independent sales and/or marketing team in the initial stages of your journey.

User research for internal products

If one or more of the user set is internal to the organization, user research can manifest unique challenges. Leaders in departments that are users of your product/solution will tell you what features they need and how the application’s flow should be, often replicating offline processes and inefficiencies. They might also discourage you from taking up too much of their team’s time on discovery conversations.

You can use a variety of tactics to manage these challenges. Encourage these leaders into the possibility of having better products and ongoing efficiency gains, clearly outlining the time required from their teams and likely topics of conversation. Leverage your stakeholders’s influence and access to get time allocation of users and evangelize a test-and-learn development process. Figure out methods that consume less time of target users (e.g., observe users as they work, listen to social chatter on internal channels, set up a recurring research council, etc.). You could also try informal channels to speak to your target users over coffee, around the water cooler, etc.

Legal support

Entrepreneurs hate the high fee to be paid to lawyers for every contract they negotiate with large clients.

Warrior Intrapreneurs/PMs/Initiative Leads pay a similarly high internal transfer price for legal services and are often required to book their lawyers' time up to one month in advance. On top of that, the reputation risk and financial risk of getting any legal terms wrong are high, and hence the diligence every contract and every term must go through.

Here, the ideal solution is to request internal legal services to get billed at cost (same for transfer pricing on internal resources). It also helps to create an automated sign-up and payment page for smaller sized contracts. Clients can click-through terms and pay vs. getting to negotiate every line in a SaaS contract. Caveat -does not work with every client, especially in the early days, but does work for some.

Security audits

It could take several hours for entrepreneurs or PMs in startups to start using services like AWS/Mongo/Stripe/Figma/Trello/JIRA. Warriors have to wait for several weeks, sometimes months, to use such software if they are not pre-approved by the IT security team. It does not matter if half the world's companies use that software. It still needs to go through a security audit.

Don't be surprised if your IT security team tells you that Mongo or Stripe sales team will need to fill up a security audit form to be eligible for use in your product.

The best preemption here is to request internal IT to pre-approve some commonly used software. You could also try to get exceptions on the most popular ones to start implementation/internal use parallel to the security audit.

Community

Warrior Intrapreneurs/PMs/Initiative Leads in large organizations that are not digital first don’t have access to well-established communities or forums for knowledge sharing. They often rely on porting the startup or tech world's advice to their situation, missing the crucial pieces required for success. 

We @Ignite are building such a community of warriors. Please let us know in case you are interested in joining.

If you are a warrior Intrapreneur/PM/Initiative Lead looking for training on systematically managing and accelerating your digital product or solution, do reach out to us at [email protected], or check out our website at https://www.bain.com/ignite.