Product-As-Strategy: Start-up superpowers for BigCo

Legacy organisations face two big problems as we stumble out of the great backlog clearance of 2020 and face up to new realities.

• They are trading on previous market-making innovations - and the market has moved on.
• They have lost the know-how to make new things at speed.

The solution is Product-As-Strategy: The application of product management discipline to solve for future needs.

Every multi-national business starts life as a start-up. Every start-up was ignited by the passionate desire to fix something that was wrong with the way things were or that could be done better. They all identified a problem that faced people and went about solving it.

By their nature they were product based. They started with the sketch of an idea. They tested that idea as cheaply as they could. They built a response to it, as fast and as inexpensively as they could. They learnt from what they did. They reshaped to align ever better to what they learned.

They had fun doing it. They were excited about creating something new that people would value. They made breakthrough products and new markets.

Sound familiar?

What I've just described is not only the spark that founds an empire, it's the rapid-iterative, insight-led and experience-centred approach applied by the most successful product, service and experience designers. It accelerates the product through Ideate-Concept-Prototype-Launch-Monitor. It applies Design Thinking, MVP (minimum viable product), Lean Start-up and Agile principles to focus on what can be learned to create value for the end user with each iteration, With appropriate insight is can only ever fail forwards (pivoting towards value) if that can be called failure.

Bringing back this way of working, re-establishing it and making it real again is one part of future-proofing today's legacy organisations. It's a very important part because an organisation - as far as its customers is concerned - IS its products.

Delivering smart product process requires a range of solutions to tackle inertias found in large organisations, for example:

Finance - product teams are best when cross functional - so who funds what, who gets rewarded for what. And when the product is 'never finished' how do you budget? Product-centred budgeting within broader product strategies offer some pointers.

HR - Hierarchies tend to flatten and roles merge. Product teams are more like start-up teams where everyone is doing a bit of everything. Low-code/no code solutions are opening tech to business people and business ideation techniques like Design Thinking are opening business to tech people. We need more fuzzy people and that takes a new approach to roles, fluid and MVP job descriptions.

There are others to tackle around the challenges of silos in large companies - the kind of silos that don't exist in start-ups, that must also be overcome. 

And they can be, and are, overcome by businesses organising themselves around product every day - with different forms of organisation drawing from agile and holacracy. Spotify is a famous example of the 'agile management' approach in which the organisation consists of Squads, Tribes and Guilds.

To get started fast, the product management process can be deployed in single strategic function; with a ring fenced budget and allocated team. This can act as Proof of Concept.

But to make this more than a fast and effective way to clear your backlog (ie solving problems you have identified from the needs identified in past contexts), we must add a way of seeing the future.

This is where my framework for the Responsive Organisation can deploy.

In brief; when impacted by a context shock, we should map the consequences (1st,2nd,3rd order...) in a systems map, identifying new contexts and using both insight and imagination (foresight) to determine new needs emerging from the human experience in those new and consequent consequences.

Naturally, these should be selected for vs an organisations own ambitions.

But in selecting to serve the needs of customers that are yet to emerge the organisation can start creating the future it intends and therefore can embrace.

This provides strategic prioritisation for the products it should make and as they iterate (with insight fed in to every step) the product shapes ever close to meeting real need as it emerges.

This combination of identifying future market-making needs to solve against, and establishing the capabilty to meet those through rapid and insight-rich product iteration means:

• The organisation re-establishes its market-making position
• The organisation builds the muscle to respond to need at speed

That is Product-As-Strategy. Start-up Superpowers for Large Companies.

Photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash

The Great Backlog clearance. Building stuff people used to need.

We are in the midst of the Great Backlog Clearance. Innovating backwards.

Granted - there is some smart, future-creating innovation being driven in pockets, but the majority of commercial activity right now has defaulted to a realisation that all that stuff we had been happy adding to backlogs, feeling in the rush of pre-Covid BAU that it could wait, we now realise is an urgent must have.

We've been generating quite a long-list for several years. Now a lot of organisations are hurtling head-long through their to-dos in a game of digital catch-up.

Hence the market demand for people who can make the stuff on that to-do list. Coders, engineers. Nuts and bolts folk. Of course, as the backlog becomes the product to ship, you then need folk to sell it. Hence the current demand for people to sell stuff you've made.

So - people who make the stuff you are in a dash to catch up with. People to sell stuff when you make it.

When you are clearing the backlog, what you don't need is people to tell you what needs to be made. There's so much to do, already, right?

Hence the lack of demand in the insight-to-innovate space.

While this may feel like the appropriate response to difficult economic circumstances, it is, instead, a short-cut to mid-term decline. Dealing with the backlog is dealing with past demand, generated in the context of a different (pre-Covid) world. One which is changed for a minimum of three years and perhaps forever.

You are building responses based on invalid insight. You are innovating backwards. You are building things people used to want. That may feel like you are getting stuff done, but it is not serving the new needs of the new contexts. It is supply to an out-moded demand.

The Responsive Organisation is seeking to build better from change. It is not looking at what it should have done in the old context. It is seeking to understand the new contexts, imagining the experience of its customers in the new, next and possible contexts of the now and next system we are feeling are way through. And it is moving fast to serve those new needs.

It is asking itself, what needs to be made now?

It is enabling the mindset, ways of working, collaborations and commercial approaches, and access to technology, to deliver best-fit solutions for the new and next nows.

So if you are busying yourself building out your pre-Covid backlog - stop. 

Reassess your backlog; revalidate the insight; start from live understanding of need in new contexts, to press the go button on your insight-to-innovate investment. Start responding to now and next.

Lift you head up, look around. You're not in Kansas anymore.

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash