I work for a startup which successfully transitioned from custom R&D projects to turnkey software. 5 years and a series A later, this exciting ride ended short of additional funding.
People tend to gravitate towards innovation, it’s a promising concept — it conveys excitement, generates expectations, both for clients and internally. But the journey from custom to turnkey can be long or arduous.
What allows you to transition from prototype to product, to a useful service that is *actually* used?
Over the years I’ve coached teams in hackathons, advised startups on R&D credits and I’ve been involved in structuring and scaling innovative products. If there’s one common component that sticks out for me is this :
picture credit dilbert.com scottadams@aol.com
Beyond the technology developed, beyond vision or company values, devising and sharing the right internal posture is a key component for producing actual, useful, valuable innovation.
Lately I’ve been obsessed with the whole digital experience, the entire customer lifecycle, from generating the initial lead down to ensuring usage and satisfaction. This takes a good deal of collaboration, and a strong, unwavering, common understanding of final expectations a user has. I’m in the process of hiring interns right now, and I realized it was important to spell out some of the things I take for granted. Here’s my list, I’d love your feedback!
Let’s start with the obvious: innovation is not technology.
You can build the best gadget, with all possible bells and whistles, but it won’t make it more useful or usable. This might sound obvious, but it can be quite tricky to stick to this when you’re trying to fit in to funding acceptance criteria or investor expectations.
Innovation is the means, not the end.
This point also seems pretty obvious, and is very closely linked to the first one, but cannot be stressed enough. Whether we’re developing, explaining or selling innovation, we always need to make sure we don’t get mixed up in the process of delivering.
Innovation shouldn’t be a marketing gimmick, and shouldn’t be oversold.
Don’t throw in trendy or ambitious taglines which turn into empty promises — hello Bullshit Bingo! Resist the temptation to woo audiences and center the message on actual product strengths, focus on strengthening features before thinking four versions ahead. Sell beyond promised delivery, and set yourself up for internal havoc and stressful account management.
Innovation should be the practical application of change.
Technological discovery can usher in a revolution, but innovation has the responsibility to make it tangible. How will this app, this service, this object *actually* improve upon the existing options around ? How can it produce a shift in habits, in practices, for the better ? Design sprints are great tools, but many more exist, it takes a little wisdom to know which one to pick.
Innovation should be easy to access or adopt.
Easy refers to the end user perspective, not from the R&D angle. Simplifying access via a functionality means making it truly accessible, not just cutting down on lines of code, shortening process time or reduce a user journey by two clicks. If your user can’t accomplish something without you, then there’s a problem.
Which leads to another point. Beware of “fake it ’til you make it”:good, lasting innovation is built on trust and transparency. Theranos is probably a great counter example. If you want to build a product and sell promises, gaining trust, is a much easier place to start from to ensure continued internal and external adoption. You might have your own secret recipe or code, these are the trump cards you need to build your business. But would you play poker with somebody who makes you feel like he’s got cards hidden up his sleeve? Customers can accept a surprising amount of trial and error, as long as they feel you’ve got their best interest at heart.
Would you play poker with somebody who makes you feel like he’s got cards hidden up his sleeve? Customers can accept a surprising amount of trial and error, as long as they feel you’ve got their best interest at heart.
Innovation should not feel invasive or condescending.
Okay, at this point, in some industries, competition is making it very hard *not* to be invasive (hello GAFA!) But their success is based on how little its user base suspected these technologies collected. Innovation should not made to be felt like a magical attribute or power which you bestow upon the user. Sounds dumb ? An aggressive sales approach can skew user perception or intimidate them even before he or she engages with your product for the first time.
And finally, innovation should be sensible, respectful.
This is closely related to the bit about not being condescending or invasive. UX, outreach or customer experiences shouldn’t be just user-centric. The way I see it, they should be grandma-empathetic — that’s my own Litmus test I use when testing ideas for improving a digital experience. If your grandmother can’t get it and get behind it, then you’re missing part of your audience. Not that grandmothers are a de facto customer segment. When done properly, making innovation simple to understand doesn’t dumb it down. The point here is that if people don’t get your message, they are much more likely to pretend they do than to call you out.
How do you measure success or performance if you’re not confident your target audience or end user gets it?
Cela fait longtemps que les RH et les “Comms” vous le disent : “on a un problème d’image ! Les gens sont contents de venir travailler, mais le système de cooptation ne prend pas, et les candidats ne viennent plus aux salons comme avant.“
“Il faut montrer qu’on est jeunes, qu’on est agiles, et qu’il fait bon bosser chez nous !”
Alistair is one of the YearOne Labs founding partner. He sits on the trailblaizing O’Reilly Media publishing company that delivered the first classics for the Lean Movement. Lean Analytics author and entrepreneur, he’s a visiting scholar at Harvard Business Reviews and founder of Fwd50, Canada’s digital government conference.
Back in 2013, Alistair Croll answered some of my questions on his hopes, childhood aspiration and future directions.
1. Your full name, age and occupation
Alistair Croll; 43. I’m an author, analyst, entrepreneur, and event organizer.
2. What was your dream job as a kid?
I didn’t have one, really. But I loved writing code and watching others use it; I was running a BBS (a precursor to web forums) on my Apple //e computer at 13, and the feedback loops—I’d change something, users would change how they interacted—was fascinating.
3. Where do you get your support or motivation from?
My wife is an incredible force in my life, though she’d be the first to deny it. I’m also lucky enough to have a circle of friends and mentors I’ve worked with over the years who point me at interesting things. My biggest motivation is curiosity; we’re here for seventy or so years, and there’s simply so much to do, see, taste and try that any day spent not discovering or debating something feels like squandering.
“It’s easy to say, “don’t build something nobody needs.” But people didn’t know they needed a Walkman, or a Dodge Caravan.”
4. What sparked your motivation or need to start your own thing?
In the late nineties, my longtime friend and co-conspirator Eric Packman bugged me to launch something (which became Networkshop, an analyst firm.) Then another friend, Thanos Moschopoulos, prodded us into turning it into a managed service provider (MSP) called Coradiant. And Ian Rae cajoled us into turning what Coradiant was doing into an appliance called TrueSight. So what sparked me was other people.These days, I’m more focused on what the world will be like in ten years. Paul Graham said that founders see the world as it will be and then build what’s missing. That’s the hard part—seeing what’s missing, and how people will use it. It’s simple to look at an iPhone or an Android today and say, “of course that’s how we take pictures, make calls, and manage our calendar.” It wasn’t so obvious ten years ago.
5. What were you the most excited about when you started off?
Any new venture has that “first day of school” feeling of clean binders and fresh pens. It’s easy to get swayed by that, and there’s certainly something cathartic about a clean slate. But if you’re starting something you know about, you spend a lot of time trying to separate your own cognitive biases from what the market really needs.What excites me the most is when I’m talking to people and I start to see patterns emerge. My Lean Analytics co-author Ben Yoskovitz and I are busy working on a workshop about Lean Analytics for Intrapreneurs. The first couple of phone calls with innovators at big companies were interesting—but by the sixth or seventh, I started seeing the “red threads” that tied them all together.That feeling of the market or problem revealing itself to you if you’re willing to dig, to be various, is thrilling.
“ I’d like to know I added more value to humanity than I took. Not sure what the metric for that is.”
6. What did you wish you knew before starting all this?
Well, in Coradiant’s case, the answer is obvious: I’d have built TrueSight first, without the MSP business that got us there. That drained a lot of funding, patience, and energy from us. I have a general aversion to businesses that require humans to deliver services these days; Marc Andreesen says software is eating the world, and I think he’s right.The big lesson, though, is balance. It’s easy to say, “don’t build something nobody needs.” But people didn’t know they needed a Walkman, or a Dodge Caravan. Those products tested horribly, but met a need people had. It’s tempting to be a nay-sayer, and only build things the world needs today. It’s also uninspiring. On the other hand, it’s reckless to build something on faith—but most great startups began there.Ultimately, I learned that balancing data-driven tactics and a ruthless honesty with a big vision and a leap of faith is incredibly hard to do well.
7. Describe a day in your life as you’d like it to be in 3 years.
That depends. If I’m building something new, which I may well be, I’d like to be talking to customers and diving deep into the minutiae of a product release, and fielding plaintive emails from people I’ve never met begging to try my new product.On the other hand, if I’m still writing, running conferences, and trying to predict where humanity will intersect with technology, then I’d like to be drinking decent wine with smart people late at night.Either way, I hope it will include a decent amount of time helping my daughter to find the same skeptical curiosity and awestruck enthusiasm with which I see the world.
“ there’s simply so much to do, see, taste and try that any day spent not discovering or debating something feels like squandering.”
8. What would you like to know about other innovators who answer this survey?
I think there is a critical metric or number in every startup that became the most important number in the company. I’d like to know what that was, and how they knew they’d found the mystical “product-market fit” when the market just pulls the product out of you.
9. What would be the one thing you’d like your eulogy to say?
That I finally finished something.Seriously, though: Tim O’Reilly has a great statement about adding more value to a system than you take away. I’d like to know I added more value to humanity than I took. Not sure what the metric for that is.
