Product

In today’s rapidly evolving tech landscape, the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in software development is no longer just a topic of interest; it’s a transformative force reshaping industry practices. Companies that adopt agile frameworks are leveraging AI tools to shorten development cycles, reduce costs, and deliver market-ready products at unprecedented speeds. This blog explores how AI tools empower agile teams to ideate, prototype, code, and debug more efficiently and how consulting services like Moves the Needle can catalyze this progress.

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Whether discovering a new value stream for a still-to-be-launched product or seeking to improve existing value creation in the face of new uncertainty, the task may seem daunting. The Value Stream Discovery Loop and Moves the Needle is available to help. The tool provides an intuitive progression to enable both value stream discovery and optimization.

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A product’s value stream provides an opportunity for organizations to identify inefficiencies, redundancy, bottlenecks, and other types of waste in their processes. Unlike most company cost-cutting efforts, mapping, analyzing, and improving the value stream leads to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, reduced costs, and increased profitability, without sacrificing value creation.

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Value streams are all the activities an organization does to create value for customers and other stakeholders (usually within a specific product). “Lean” practitioners help you map your workflows, so you can see how to improve them while maintaining value creation. But what if the value isn’t there? Or you’re creating a new product? Or “innovating?”

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The Value Stream Discovery Loop is a customer-centric approach to value creation. It helps businesses understand what their customers need and how they can provide value to them in an efficient, value-enhancing way. At its core, this is accomplished by looking at a customer’s lifecycle journey from their perspective.

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Tracing the origin and evolution of Product management to understand how we got here and what's next to continue to drve business impact.

People often aren’t conscious of their needs or how to address them. This explains why we buy a lot of things we don’t need. Because of this, if one wants to create value in the world, it’s up to product managers to understand needs. In other words, they shouldn’t be asking customers what they want or asking them to predict how they might behave in the future. 

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The pandemic marked a point of acceleration for corporate digital transformation. The companies that performed the best were digital or had at least adopted a digital age mindset. These organizations are now living in a world where the product is never done and their systems, structures, and processes must reflect that. The product management function is the right group to design, test, and iterate upon those systems.

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Product Management has been a discipline in the business world for several decades. However, it has become increasingly important with the acceleration of digital transformation in large businesses. As organizations continue to adapt to advancements in technology, and increasingly incorporate digital solutions into their products, Product Management will be a critical part of product success and innovation. Product Management will help organizations understand what their customers need and create new products and services that meet those needs for both the short and long term. The Product Management function leads the way in the human side of digital transformation.

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Opportunity discovery is the practice of figuring out where a business can find new growth. It’s the phase that comes before customer discovery and before product idea. (You can actually start with either of those, but should take a big stop backward to figure out more about the actual opportunity.)

There are 4 parts to opportunity discovery. In this episode, we'll be going over these 4 parts and the process of finding said opportunities.

We optimize what we measure, since if you measure the right things then humans will naturally adapt to optimizing them. History shows us, for example, if you measure innovation by the number of ideas or the number of patents, that’s what you get–ideas and patents. If you wanted something else, you should have measured something else. So how do you identify the right metrics? If you want to truly digitally transform your company, you need to start with the basics: focusing on the data that indicates progress towards outcomes -- Progress Impact Metrics (PIM).

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What’s so interesting about KPIs and OKRs is every few years there’s a new framework for metrics, but essentially, they’re always about outcomes. So, what are the desired outcomes?
We want more customers. We want happier customers. We want more revenue, more growth, and more market share.

That's going to keep the bosses happy and their bosses happy. And ultimately, will make investors and Wall Street happy. The challenge is when we’re down levels from those mega-desired outcomes, we don't feel like we can influence them too much.

Dividing your company into execution (delivery) mode vs exploration (discovery) mode, as recommended by the multi-named mythology of “ambidextrous organizations,” “dual operating systems,” or “dual innovation,” will prevent you from competing efficiently in the digital age. There are 4 simple steps to create operating mechanisms for dual track teams, i.e., teams that are responsible for execution also explore.

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Opportunity Discovery phase helps you determine the different needs that exist for each customer persona within your sandbox. There are 4 steps that can help you identify the opportunity by figuring out all of the actions that are being taken in the journey of a particular job, then you hypothesize where you might make an impact leveraging your company’s existing competitive advantages. You test whether these ideas positively impact the job, if the customer cares, and whether there’s a viable business model using rapid experimentation, e.g. Lean Startup.

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The trap that many corporations fall into is the belief that digital transformation is mostly a technological thing. This couldn’t be further from the truth, as there’s a human side to digital transformation. And while technology is disruptive to the business, it is not disruptive innovation. Disruptive innovation is a purposeful re-imagining of how you structure and manage your work. It's recognizing that the real disruptions are external to the company, mostly in the form of pandemics, war, ransomware attacks, supply shocks, energy grid collapses, etc.

So the question becomes: how do you drive disruptive innovation? Start exploring within the core?

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