Move an Industrial Technology B2B firm to an iterative ‘lean startup’ inspired product development approach to solve for quicker launches and better product/market fit.
Challenge: How does one change the fundamental machinery for new product development in a large industrial technology firm?
Impact: Fit for purpose process deployed with several successes (lower cycle time and quicker kills/pivots)
Situation: Here was a large industrial technology leader with decades of success with its product development processes. However with rapid changes in some categories like software and IoT – nimble startups were a threat. A shift was needed to stay competitive by going faster and coming up with better quality offerings. Some of the challenges were.
- Varying types of products being developed (long cycle molecule development to software and connected offerings)
- Teams used to waterfall development and in several cases it has led to good results
- How much change is the right amount? Teams suffering from ‘initiative fatigue’
- Lack of rigor especially in the front end of the project in terms of customer discovery
- Natural bias to being solution/technology forward versus market oriented
- Limited resources to drive this massive change in one of the orgs core processes
- Culture of failure on new product projects is equated to personal failure
Approach: A ground’s up effort in terms of leading change on the fundamental product development machinery.
- The main approach here was a test based iterative approach using real pilots from each of the business units on differing types of offerings (long cycle tech to fast software development)
- The goal was to learn using these pilots what approaches and tools worked and what didn’t
- Key was to understand what would be needed for scale beyond a few pilots
- The main approach in terms of the actual process were to try a lean startup/discovery driven planning based approach for the initial discovery phase (idea to business case)
- This is where I built a digital platform to manage customer discovery which was critical to ensure a common approach and real time visibility in terms of progress.
- For development or delivery the idea was to use a agile based approach using milestones/sprints versus going on for months without any deliverables
- Part of the scale up operation was identification of suitable product managers who could play the role of coaches in the future to help sustain the change beyond the pilots.
- Also crucial to the change was to recognize early successes – especially project teams that quickly killed a bad idea or pivoted
Impact: By design and launch of a fit for purpose lean startup inspired product development process we were able to start to achieve the following
- Key staff including product managers, technology leaders and business leaders trained and onboard
- Several types of initial projects run in pilot mode to test and refine the process before mass scale up
- Cycle time for the initial discovery phase (idea to business case) cut significantly
- Improved quality of customer discovery deliverables including value propositions and customer needs
- A good percentage of the initial projects saw quicker kills/pivots – which means savings on wasted development costs and crucially opportunity costs
- This new lean startup inspired approach now mainstream
