Building great products, fast when you have limited capacity.

What a tumultuous year it has been!

We have been talking about the acceleration of change for most of my business career, and particularly the last 10 years as the digital economy accelerated. Well, it just got even faster. It is no understatement that the world has been rapidly reconfigured in the last four months. McKinsey has labelled it “The Great Acceleration” (link below).

Executive teams and boards across the world are now (re)considering the year ahead, and how they structure their businesses, their priorities and where to invest their capital. For those who are trying to actively forecast or predict the year, and years ahead, some grand fictions will be created and elaborated, and potentially accepted as truths.  Some fictions might head them in the right direction, and some will be very destructive.  The only certainty is that no-one knows what the next year holds. 

I believe that business leaders and entrepreneurs alike need to fundamentally adjust their expectations and mental models. Given everything is uncertain, embrace that reality. Know that you need to move forward, sensing the environment, reading the signals, running some experiments. Once you have more information or signal that gives you more confidence in an opportunity then it is about moving fast, rapidly taking advantage of that knowledge. Those are the people that will provide outsized returns and long lasting resilience to their businesses. 

Let me give a specific example of rapid innovation in practice.  One of my clients is an Australian tech company. They have seen incredible success in their market. Innovation leaders in the company identified an opportunity adjacent to their core business, however they had capacity constraints, and they didn’t want to lose focus and take people and time away from their core platforms. 

To explore this adjacent opportunity, they partnered with us to deliver a “minimum viable product” in order to better understand the new opportunity. In this case, it needed to be a well designed, well engineered, scalable product that met the standards of the global e-commerce platform they were integrating with. They didn’t want to throw it away after they built it. It needed to be the core of a future product without over investing, and without taking focus away from their core product roadmap.  

We delivered this MVP with high touch engagement with the product team, and low touch engagement with their tech team. 

This approach gave them a lot of information:

• It is a real, active product, giving them a true understanding of how to engage new users. They got to understand the messages that resonated to get adoption, and the messages that didn't work. 
• They received feedback about the usability, performance, and stability of the system and ecosystem they are working within.
• They received early information about the internal operational impacts of the new product, allowing them to reconfigure their operational processes. 
• They started to understand in what ways and how much the product benefits their customers.
• They are getting suggestions about how to make it MORE valuable. 
• They also learned how to partner with an external company to deliver innovation. Partnering is a different way to scale, and understanding how it works and how to optimise it creates options for a business. 

This approach has multiple advantages. 

• They didn’t distract much from their core business. 
• The initial investment fit into a quarterly discretionary funding cycle. They invested some capital, got a product that works and is the seed of a new business opportunity without overcommitting.  
• Anyone that has tried to introduce innovation or new product ideas into a company know that internal support is key. By starting this way, they could bring the rest of the business along the journey at an appropriate pace. It is a different space with different needs. Instead of waiting for alignment, they can show other stakeholders what it is with data and insights.  
• They are building their roadmap and backlog directly with customer feedback and market insight.

The approach they took - partnering to build the MVP - also has investment allocation advantages. With better information from the market they can right size their investment: If the return is either not significant enough, or uncertain, they can stop and capture the lessons.  If the opportunity is clear and significant, they can double down on this new opportunity, rapidly scaling because their partner (us) can meet the demand faster than they can hire a full team.  Alternatively, they could move people from the core product to the new product if they see the return being bigger. - but in this case they don’t have to choose between opportunities. ?Por qué no los dos? - “Why not both?” 

* https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/the-great-acceleration