Customer-first & product-led – Tips on boosting innovation at enterprises

Steve Jobs once said, “Innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity – not a threat.” Sounds inspiring, sure, but how do you leverage these opportunities and prevent the diffusion of innovation in an enterprise setting? This week on Catalyst, Launch by NTT DATA’s own Product Management Lead Jamie Bernard joins Chris LoSacco to discuss her advice on how large organizations can learn to innovate while still taking care of their core business.

Movers & shakers in a stable world…

The stability of large enterprises can be both a blessing and a curse. Organizational complexity, risk aversion, budget allocation, and resistance to disruption are just a few roadblocks at enterprises that can make innovation incredibly challenging. 

So how do you keep innovation from stalling out? How do you balance innovation with your core offerings? How can we encourage the movers and shakers while supporting the core offering? Jamie shared her wealth of brilliant advice with us on how to achieve this balance: 

Look to your customers for product market fit

The ‘if-you-build-it-they-will-come’ mindset is a thing of the past. Now our focus should be on embracing the customer-first mindset, identifying real customer pain points, and building products that solve valuable customer problems. At the end of the day, the customer is the one that’s making the money. 

Conway's Law

Conway's Law states that systems are built in alignment with an organization's structure, leading to siloing and hindering cross-communication and collaboration. Decoupling this and shaking up an existing structure is, frankly, expensive, scary, and a big gamble. Overcoming these challenges requires a culture shift, but it’s essential for becoming a product-led organization. 

Three horizons

Jamie discusses the three horizons approach to budget allocation for product development. This involves allocating 85% of the budget to the core offering, 10% to improving existing products, and 5% to experimentation and prototyping for new ideas.

Crossing the Chasm

As a twist on Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation model, the "chasm" in Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm is the gap products must hurdle in order to get from early to mainstream market adoption — and it’s tough for even the largest of enterprises to complete successfully. It’s crucial to be aware of this chasm and not let your momentum die here, but what does that entail? Your relationships are critical. Collaboration with marketing and support can make all the difference.

Collaboration with marketing and support

Strong collaboration between product teams and marketing is vital to effectively communicate the value proposition of a product to potential customers. Similarly, involving customer support teams early on helps to identify pain points and improve the product's user experience. Friendlies (users who will give you valuable, actionable feedback) are an often overlooked resource that will potentially serve as advocates, and are absolutely worth the time and effort. 

Leveraging brand equity

Established enterprises can use their brand credibility and industry expertise to bolster new products and ideas, gaining a competitive advantage in the market.

Journey map your competition

Look at what your competition is doing, look at what you're doing, and try to objectively look at the things that your competitors are doing better than you and why the customer flocked to them for that sort of thing. Those conversations can sometimes be scary, but it’s crucial to ask yourself, “How can we solve the problems for the customers so that we can be the disruptor, and maybe avoid disruption or at least give our competitors a run for their money so that we don't lose a big portion of market share?”

If this resonates with you, if you’ve been struggling to figure out product market fit and your team just doesn't get it, please reach out! We would love to hear from you. We have a brand new email address: catalyst@nttdata.com. We'd love to talk about this stuff and we will figure out how we can help you. Yes, you can wear the black turtleneck if you care to. 

And don’t forget to subscribe to Catalyst wherever you get your podcasts! We drop a new episode every Tuesday, and each one is jam-packed with catalysts for digital experiences that move millions.