With more than one in 10 product leaders admitting less than 10% of their company’s innovation leads to product launch, there is a need for companies to change. CJ Daniel-Nield, Founder of digital product studio, Planes, offers advice on how to identify and address the challenges stopping business growth. He explores the importance of getting C-Suite buy-in, how businesses can mature their approach to product and how to empower the right people.
Product is the key to successful innovation. According to our new research, 95% of product leaders agree a more effective approach to product would improve innovation in their organisation.
‘Product’ refers to a business’s strategy, culture and decision-making revolving around the value the product provides to the customer. Product-first businesses are customer-centric, data-driven and embrace iterative development.
However, many large organisations are too big to confidently run agile and collaborative product rituals. A combination of legacy processes and stakeholders, siloed teams and funding cycles all act as barriers to success.
As a result, innovation efforts aren’t turning into tangible results. Over one in 10 product leaders admitted less than 10% of their company’s innovation leads to a launch.
So, if being product-first is key to business growth, why are so many large organisations still getting it wrong?
Getting C-suite buy-in is important
Large organisations must figure out where they’re going wrong on the journey to becoming a product-first business.
The first step is to get C-suite buy-in. This means having a strategy with backing from leadership and key stakeholders. In practice, this often means you have a CPO or VP of Product who reports directly to the CEO. Most importantly, you have a product role that is defined and widely understood throughout the company.
But it’s not as easy as it sounds. Businesses get stuck at this stage due to silos or conflicting priorities between teams, which prevents a holistic understanding of the role of product.
Encouragingly, our research showed that 94% of leaders agree that the role of product is adequately understood at C-suite level. This is unsurprising given that product leaders often spend more time advocating, rather than executing, product.
However, many businesses don’t progress properly past the buy-in stage or find themselves continually having to come back to it. The time that leaders spend on this step is one of the reasons why many companies aren’t able to turn innovation efforts into tangible product or feature launches.
Few companies are regularly releasing
How can the companies that do progress past the buy-in stage, mature their approach to product? According to our research, less than a third (31%) of respondents think half their organisation’s innovation leads to product launch on average.
In order to turn innovation efforts into a product launch, companies need to be making customer-first decisions and de-risking launches by releasing little and often.
Companies at this stage of product maturity will be conducting regular user research to listen to the customer at all points of the user journey and building new features that solve real user problems.
But getting to a stage where teams are launching little and often is where most companies struggle. Businesses must learn to manage risk by taking small bets rather than prioritising multi-year projects. This mindset requires cross-functional teams which build and deploy weekly.
The reality is that businesses find it difficult to launch little and often because it requires an experimentation mindset that goes against how large organisations are set up. Teams remain siloed with competing priorities, there’s too much red tape to get things out quickly and people aren’t empowered to make mistakes.
Product leaders aren’t fully empowered to fulfil their role
Businesses that want to successfully innovate need to build a product-first culture with fully empowered teams. If your business is user-testing and launching regularly you might move to the next stage: being outcome-driven and aligned on the strategy across the business. The final step looks like having fully empowered teams.
However, only 55.9% of product leaders agree they are adequately empowered to fulfil their role to the best of their ability, a critical part of achieving innovation. That means 44.1% aren’t.
In the end, the goal is to have teams that are aligned, where everybody has the autonomy and ability to run experiments. Because that’s really what a product culture facilitates: good experimentation. And good experimentation unlocks successful innovation.
There’s a lot on the line for businesses that aren’t set up to be product-first or are stuck at the early stages of the process. To progress, everyone in the company needs to adopt product practices. It can’t just fall to your CPO.
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