I define consistent innovation as the ability of a team to repeatedly add value to the business. Many organizations lose their ability to innovate at scale, and this is incredibly frustrating to both leaders and the members of the product teams. It's one of the main reasons people often leave large companies for startups.
But losing the ability to innovate is absolutely and demonstrably not inevitable. Some of the most consistently innovative companies in our industry are very large—consider Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Netflix as examples.
Organizations that lose the ability to innovate at scale are inevitably missing one or more of the following attributes:
Customer‐centric culture. As Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon says, “Customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don't yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf.” Companies that don't have this focus on customers—and direct and frequent contact with them—lose this passion and critical source of inspiration.
Compelling product vision. By the time many companies reach scale, their original product vision is now largely realized, and the team is struggling to understand what's next. This is often compounded because the original founders may have moved on, and they were likely the keepers of the vision. In this case, someone else—usually either the CEO or the VP product—needs to step up and fill this void.
“Customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don't yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf.”
Focused product strategy. One of the surest paths to product failure is to try to please everyone at once. Yet large companies often forget this reality. The product strategy needs to spell out a logical and intentional sequence of target markets for the product teams to focus on.
Strong product managers. The lack of a strong and capable product manager is typically a major reason for lack of product innovation. When a company is small, the CEO or one of the co‐founders usually plays this role, but at scale, each product team depends on a strong and capable product manager.
Stable product teams. One of the prerequisites for consistent innovation is a team that has had a chance to learn the space, technologies, and customer pain. This doesn't happen if the members of the team are constantly shifting.
Engineers in discovery. So often the key to innovation is the engineers on the team, but this means (a) including them from the very beginning, and not just at the end and (b) exposing them directly to the customer pain.
Corporate courage. It's no secret that many companies become extremely risk averse as they grow larger. There is, of course, much more to lose. But the best technology‐product companies know that the riskiest strategy of all is to stop taking risks. We do have to be smart about how we work, but the willingness to risk disruption to our current business is essential to consistent innovation.
Empowered product teams. Even though your organization might have begun by using best practices, many organizations regress as they scale, and if you've reverted to just handing your teams roadmaps of features, then you no longer can expect the benefits of empowered product teams. Remember that empowerment means the teams are able to tackle and solve the business problems they've been assigned in the best way they see fit.
Product mindset. In an IT‐mindset organization, the product teams exist to serve the needs of the business. In contrast, in a product‐mind set organization, the product teams exist to serve the company's customers in ways that meet the needs of the business. The resulting differences between these mind sets are many and profound.
Time to innovate. At scale, it's very possible that your product teams are entirely consumed just doing what we call keep the lights on activities. Fixing bugs, implementing capabilities for different parts of the business, addressing technical debt, and more. If this is your situation, you shouldn't be surprised at the lack of innovation. Some of this is normal and healthy, but be sure that your teams have the room to also pursue harder and more impactful problems.
I hope you notice that the above list essentially describes a culture of consistent innovation. It's much more about culture than it is about process—or anything else.