Schumpeterian competition
Are you really doing enough to keep yourself up, alive & kicking given the Schumpeterian competition rampant today…?
With the turn of the 2000s came the internet that brought about a wave of disruption & a host of technologies that snowballed into a few odd platforms, packages, boilerplates, IDEs that made it super-easy to not just code but also to debug, maintain & rebuild software / Apps with the concept of WORA (Write Once Run Anywhere) taking over eventually leading to potential reuse. The development & rate of disruption that was seen here may have been rather slow (as opposed to what we have seen in the last 5 years) given how many Tech areas were revisited, revamped & remodeled to incorporate “the changes in the business side of things”. Over a period of time we also saw those applications getting transformed into what could be rightfully termed legacy systems, given their age of creation & the time they have managed to serve, not discounting the periodic advancement(s) incorporated progressively.
Then came the 2020s where AI as we see it is bringing a more pronounced wave of disruption affecting every pocket of our lives, the way live & work, not to mention the way we envision & create. Today, we have everything that can get done at our fingertips by posting a few odd (largely unstructured) thoughts as a prompt & the mere click on a button.
If you stop to analyze this phenomenon closely, you’d notice a kind of destruction that’s prevalent here:
the destruction of creative freedom
the destruction of an enforced stricture
the destruction of structured thought process
the destruction of the adherence to suggested or proven methods
the destruction of the tranquility of an entire slice of workforce that was once thought to be an essential backbone of orgs building software
A kind that could be termed “CREATIVE DESTRUCTION” (I’d like to call it CREATIVE DISRUPTION though) as penned down by Joseph Schumpeter in his book “CAPITALISM, SOCIALISM & DEMOCRACY” dating back to 1942.
Although the points above suggest a tinge of & common perception would gravitate towards a whole lot of negativity given the word destruction, it may not be that bad after-all for the orgs. & the markets / users they are looking to serve.
“The markets & the direction it tends to take is akin to the course of a flowing river stream, when it is not within everybody’s capacity to alter its course / direction, the ones (although as less as 1 in a million) who do it tend to win & win big”
So, given the dynamic nature of the markets that’s driven entirely by innovation what can you do as a product manager / leader / cofounder / entrepreneur to trump it & emerge on top of it, time & again?
What ought to be your mantra?
Here’s something of a cheat sheet to help out.
1) Promote a brand of USER-CENTRICITY
Being user centric would simply mean to start off thinking about everything from the standpoint of the users. And to be able to do that well one ought to:
> “Understand the users well”
How can one be sure about understanding the user?
Staying close to your users isn’t limited to the features you have built & collecting feedback over it. It goes well & truly beyond that in terms of reading between the lines as for picking up on the gaps that are prevalent in the user’s ongoing problems & the solutions you have built thus far.
When it is believed that the solution to a problem does indeed give rise to another problem elsewhere, it requires a keen eye & an absolute attention to detail as for the pain points of your users as it is quite possible that their needs evolve over a period of time, the cadence of which could depend quite rightly on your competition & what they are getting elsewhere in the market vis-à-vis your product offering.
> “Prioritize features that add supreme value”
Between the goals of your org., your revenue numbers & building the right feature(s) that can add supreme value NOW, what would you prioritize?
When none of the PMs / entrepreneurs would be alien to prioritization methods, not all of them would be comfortable with prioritizing users’ when pitted against the goals given the anomalies & the ambiguities. But, if you look at the larger picture, prioritizing for org’s goals & the user’s needs ought to go hand-in-hand & in perfect alignment, more like one feeding off the other.
But that’s again subject to a few preconditions like carefully conducted research to gain insight into every bit / a nuance of the workflow & for prolonged periods of time as the case demands.
So, the bottom-line here is that your user’s needs & the goals of the org. ought to sync perfectly well. You can’t have one of them pointing EAST with the other one tending WEST. The cohesiveness between goals & needs is the key here as for smoother prioritization towards getting the teams largely in alignment. And any change in user behavior ought to be captured, factored in when tailoring features / solutions.
2) Challenge the STATUS QUO
The relentless spirit to question whether what’s on hand is enough / will suffice or whether it can be bettered in any way & exploring the means to get there is not doubt, pretty challenging. And one can’t do that without internally implementing something like:
> “Continuous improvement”
How can you for sure say that you are always heading in the right direction? And what’s the basis for that?
A “process” being overlooked by most of the team members across orgs & geographies, brushing it aside as a banal / mundane, not giving it the onus it deserves, is more or less the order of the day, more so in large corporates. Which is also why most orgs have their own way of enforcing it down the throats of the team members to route the work through proper channels, obtain all necessary permissions before they affect any sort of changes major / minor.
So, one way to ensure you are improving as a team is to earmark the right metrics & continuously gauge them over a period of time towards ensuring those KPIs are knocked off, moving the needle sufficiently beyond the indicative margins towards pinning on pronounced growth, exceeding expectations. An example of such KPI could be “rate of adoption to be above 85%”. Tracking it immediately post a release vis-à-vis 2 quarters later could also stand to indicate continual growth & nonetheless be a testimonial for continuous improvement.
3) Culture driven by INNOVATION
Innovation doesn’t just happen across one dimension, it requires an overall upliftment of all teams & members. Also, when some part of the innovation gets exposed to the wide world, some could still be private / internal to an org., given how it pertains to their own workflow involving a subtle but yet super-effective change over how they take products from 0-1. You can’t call yourself pro-innovation if you don’t pin on:
> “Freedom to Fail”
How conducive is the team environment & is it really bent towards commissioning innovation? What does the leadership consider important right now?
Leadership support is crucial in this scenario as they are the ones with the power to commission & override any sort of initiatives that point towards innovation. Truth be told, the number of teams / people who hit even a meagre degree of success for the very first time as they were looking to innovate could be countable over one’s fingertips. Reason is simple. It is not that easy to land ground-breaking / path-breaking innovation day-in, day-out. It takes a lot out from a person. Fatigue, turmoil, failures, stages of feeling sour (“the not so great feeling”) & looking to quit it all at once & here (“dump it & run the other way feeling”).
Innovation is also pretty much a team-game given how the leadership ought to give teams the leeway to ideate seamlessly, build a platform & encourage smooth idea exchange which may demand that they forgo a few short cycles of revenue over the upcoming quarter(s), so as to prioritize something that can then take the market by a storm & disrupt it all on a whim. Wining & winning big at times demand that one looks beyond those conventional QoQ revenues.
4) Mindset that’s ENTREPRENEURIAL
When it is debatable that the entrepreneurial mindset ought to be seen & felt pretty much across the organizational ladder, it ought to be prevalent across the decision makers & the ones feeding them with the data to make those decisions to say in the least. And one can’t get there without:
> “Autonomy to Ideate”
How frequently do teams debate ideas? At what cadence does it happen?
The whole idea exchange exercise & the correlative debates could happen at almost every org., the ones who make it successfully are the ones who have the wherewithal (the teams) with seamless execution skills so as to take it from 0-1 come what may & have a measure of what could be right or wrong about the market & the direction they plan on taking. They ought to call the market & be largely right about it.
Having something of a ritual at a regular cadence where ideas are spawned, collated & ranked in order of priority post factoring the needs of the users could help a great deal here. Now, the cadence of the ritual could depend on the onus the leadership & the org. as a whole places on innovation. For orgs. that have trumped the AI side of things in the recent past, one can be sure innovation is & has been primary for them. They may be debating ideas multiple times a day, allowing for seamless exchange & gradation, effectively re-ranking / reorganizing & parking (not truncating / trashing) the ones that didn’t make the cut over the current cycle.
> “Collective & transparent brainstorming”
What’s the participation rate over those brainstorming sessions?
You may have been at places where ideas get discussed like a one-way news bulletin. The one who has the authority & more often also the originator of the idea would steal the show, get on stage & read out the idea like headlines from the morning newspaper, giving nobody a chance to speak, allowing no room for any sort of discussion over it, calling it final. It would be apt to term it a execution plan of a military operation rather than an idea exchange / brainstorming session.
Idea exchange ought to merit a discussion & that’s mandatory. I have seen success when I actually build the business case canvas using a whiteboard & depict / arrive at the market right in front of the audience, as opposed to popping a slide with the canvas already prepared. This way one can be sure to have more skin in the game, make it more real for the audience giving them a sense of belongingness allowing them to follow the whole thing pin-to-pin, in detail whilst giving them enough room to interrupt you for any queries in between. No better way to make the whole exercise fruitful, both as for the objective of alignment, prioritization & not to forget the most important of all – participation.
5) Invest in FUTURISTIC TECH, R&D
Take a good look at the teams at the orgs. that are leading the pack with AI & innovation today. You can be sure of one thing. There would most certainly be a separate budget allotted to build a research team from the ground up & one can’t ignore the possibility of a heavy chunk of investment going into an R&D facility. If you’re looking to define the future this is quintessential whether you happen to be in the hardware / software space.
> “Setting & beefing up R&D facility”
Can we really term our Tech as cutting-edge? Or do we have something in the pipeline that has the potential to be labeled so?
Breakthrough research doesn’t happen every day and that’s one of the harshest truths every one investing in R&D ought to deal with. But with the right blend of talent & a team possessing a sense of dynamism about themselves, the way they work, meticulously go about their workflow could increase the probability of them landing substantial inventions.
But that sadly has a root in the thought process of the leadership & the management. To orient oneself towards R&D one ought to be able to overlook what’s available in the market right now & be able to envision a whole new way that’s not just effective but at the same time efficient, or can be made efficient over silos to say in the least. What’s the fun in R&D landing an invention that’s going to cost a bomb & be accessible to only a select few? Taking a leap out of the continuous improvement chapter, the instinct of almost every team member ought to be bent towards comparing, questioning, arriving at routes that can possibly be better than the ones being adhered to as of today, albeit progressively & constantly.