Balancing the need to be Customer-Focused with the need to "Innovate"
oneknightinproduct.substack.com
I ran a poll on Twitter recently, asking the longest time period people had been asked to provide roadmaps for. The results were surprising! The longest period I have ever been asked to provide a roadmap for was 2 years. I pointed out all the usual arguments against this:
A roadmap greater than 6 months out that isn't a complete make believe situation in fintech seems impossible. To quote the great Kevin Garnett, however..."Anything is possible!"
I've started trying to re-frame innovation to equate to a successful change in human behavior. Changing human behavior that solves a problem while creating value for the business is what we do - so what if we repositioned innovation to this?
A lot of the times when I see innovation and customer centricity put on a see saw what is not talked about is the messy process that was required to get to PMF: Saying yes to a lot of customers to drive some meaningful growth (build this because they said they'd pay!!!) results in a fragmented core on v0.1 features. Everyone is then asking for v0.2 stuff on a whole bunch of different things so let's stack rank based off of revenue and continue to make them happy = customer centricity! Instead this is usually the time to start saying bye to customers, deprecating features that are not widely used and defining and focusing on your core...
A roadmap greater than 6 months out that isn't a complete make believe situation in fintech seems impossible. To quote the great Kevin Garnett, however..."Anything is possible!"
I've started trying to re-frame innovation to equate to a successful change in human behavior. Changing human behavior that solves a problem while creating value for the business is what we do - so what if we repositioned innovation to this?
A lot of the times when I see innovation and customer centricity put on a see saw what is not talked about is the messy process that was required to get to PMF: Saying yes to a lot of customers to drive some meaningful growth (build this because they said they'd pay!!!) results in a fragmented core on v0.1 features. Everyone is then asking for v0.2 stuff on a whole bunch of different things so let's stack rank based off of revenue and continue to make them happy = customer centricity! Instead this is usually the time to start saying bye to customers, deprecating features that are not widely used and defining and focusing on your core...