There is more than one way to “Do” Innovation

Photo by Andrew

“Innovation” has been showing up more and more in conversations I have with leaders. I take it as a positive sign for businesses and am excited that leaders are looking to invest more in innovation now. The question is: what do they mean by innovation, and how do they do it? 

A colleague and I were asked to provide advice for a new product team that will be kicking off soon. Their product owner has been conducting user interviews, and they've defined a great objective and set of key results for the measurable outcomes they like to see from the product. The team is being asked to modernize an existing product that other teams also work on. There is also desire to change the technology and openness to disruption. 

Hearing their goals and desires, my colleague and I quickly realized that there are two possible ways they could approach this, and they were only familiar with one of them. We took the opportunity to talk to them about ideas from Geoffrey Moore’s book Zone to Win, specifically the Productivity Zone and Incubation Zone.

Productivity Zone 

The company has an existing product that is currently being used by hundreds, if not thousands, of employees. Product leaders have defined strong OKRs to communicate measurable targets to improve these employees’ experiences. They thought about how to dedicate a team to focus on these product goals and determined the people for a team with a product owner, UX, tech lead, and three developer pairs. 

Kicking off this team to understand the vision, set working agreements, and enhance the current product in the direction of the OKRs is the familiar option and a viable one. They would make regular enhancements to the existing product to achieve measurable improvements.

Incubation Zone 

The leaders mentioned hopes of modernizing the technology and how employees work as a result of the product. They were more excited as they talked about the possibility of creating this positive disruption for their operations. The less familiar option that this sparked is to take a startup approach to develop a new competitive product for their users.

In this case, the team will need to come up with and test ideas to mitigate the four product risks: feasibility, usability, business viability, and value. While they are creating a product that that may ultimately achieve their OKRs, they would be starting from nothing. It would be impossible to ask them in three months if they had made measurable progress on those OKRs to improve compared to the current experience. The team would need to show that their new product provides value to employees. That the employees can figure out how to use it. And that we can build it and make it work for the organization. 

They would quickly fail the OKR check here. But in startup mode, they could quickly learn about the employees’ pain points and test potential solutions.

The caveat here is that a team of a product owner, UX, tech lead, and three developer pairs will not be able to test and learn quickly enough with their large team size. Each team member will struggle to find how they can contribute, and ideas might expand so everyone can participate, hurting their speed of learning and experimenting.

What they would want is a team of three people: a product owner, UX, and a developer. Fully dedicated to the product and enabled to work in this different model. It's scrappy, and the code is not written to scale. They’re nimble in trying to find a way to mitigate all four product risks and disrupt the current solution. The investment horizon is different, but so is the potential payoff. 

Summary

The Incubation Zone isn't necessarily better or worse than the Productivity Zone. The difficulty is that a team cannot do both simultaneously. We've seen firsthand that when a team is given productivity goals and incubation goals, the Productivity Zone will win. As a leader who wants to encourage innovation, make sure your investment model matches your goals.