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...
Balancing the need to be Customer-Focused with the need to "Innovate"
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...