Ode to the Clear Business Benefit

So now that you have a sh#tty first draft of an idea of something you want to do…how do you also make sure it has Clear Business Benefit to the company. Unless your idea has Clear Business Benefit, you'll be pushback on ALL fronts, so I highly recommend you find that Clear Business Benefit and be able to tie it to your idea.

How do you do that? I like to think up ideas in 4 categories of Clear Business Benefit:

1. Ideas that help delight your EXISTING customers
2. Ideas that help attract NEW customers
3. Ideas that help delight your EXISTING colleagues/co-workers
4. Ideas that help attract NEW colleagues/co-workers

I'll share two examples that cover the above:

When my partner in chaos, Jeremiah Marble and I decided to embark on a coaching entrepreneurs program in Nigeria, we had two goals:

1. Figure out how to make a better product for our EXISTING customers in emerging markets
2. Make Microsoft products the best option for NEW customers in emerging markets

 These two goals wound up being super important as we did this work because very few members of our upper management "got" why two nerdy engineers were coaching Nigerian entrepreneurs. The answer was simple. "Business owner" was the most common profession in Nigeria (around 80% of Nigerian identify as being an entrepreneur) INCLUDING people who had jobs in corporations. And guess what, entrepreneurs use technology. We wanted every existing and emerging business owner in Nigeria to use OUR technology. So our first step was to deeply understand their tech needs.

The second example is of my friend Sacha, who works in college recruiting at Microsoft. Sacha is leading a program as a "side-hustle" at Microsoft called From Job to Dream Job. Her mission to help people in the college recruiting team to create a "passion project" at work and then to talk about it publicly. She had two goals of this:

1. Figure out how to make happier her EXISTING colleagues
2. Figure out how to hire NEW colleagues

She knew one thing, people who were given a safe space to come up with intrapreneurial ideas were more excited about their jobs AND were more likely to stay in the company. Plus, when college students hear about all of the passion projects we have going on apart from just our day job, they see Microsoft as a place they'd really like to join.

So, those are some of ours. What about you? Do you have an intrapreneurial venture at work? What Clear Business Benefit does it tie to?

<3 Dona

I'm a software engineer, an author, a fashion designer and a speaker splitting my time between Seattle and airplanes. Come hang out at https://donasarkar.com