Pathways to Growth for Mature Organizations and Startups
Of course, large enterprises can innovate, but it is harder for them than for startups. Many do not know where to begin. They look back and recall how, as a startup, they discovered the product-market fit that made them successful. And now, in full growth mode, they attack innovation with the mindset of growth they have today – which does not work.
Commitment is rare. Building a culture of commitment in your organization accelerates trust.
People often avoid making small interpersonal commitments because they are risky. According to Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning and prolific academic, we value loss about twice as much as we value gains, thus it follows that we are more likely to avoid a negative experience resulting from a missed promise than to take the unnecessary risk of making a commitment. However, when you make commitments and keep them, even small promises, it builds trust faster. Being purposeful about the promises and commitments you make to your customers, your colleagues, and your friends can transform your business and even your life. Building commitment into your culture and empowering your people to make measured and valuable commitments can have a big impact on how you earn trust. Companies often make contractual guarantees and issue warranties because they know how important commitments are, but the small promises that are made every day, through normal interactions can be just as important in helping your people and your firm earn trust from your customers. Lots of small, valuable interpersonal commitments add up, over time, and can be even more valuable to the people you serve than those big corporate commitments that we tout in our marketing materials. This small tactic also has the ability to transform your internal culture by boosting internal trust between colleagues. As long as the intent to keep them is certain.
Product builders chasing the elusive product-market fit move through two key stages in pursuit of long-term product success. The work they do on the path to product-market fit is a lot different than it is after they’ve achieved it. And the difference in the approaches they take to this work is critical.
There’s more to creating effective documentation than merely gathering information. As a consumer of documentation, you know this to be true. Because you’ve been there. We all have.
At first enthused by the seeming treasure trove of information assembled to guide your learning and project progress, your excitement is quickly dashed as your search for the proverbial needle in a haystack drags on. What first appeared as the holy grail of actionable knowledge becomes a fruitless quest for that one elusive piece of information you need to move forward on a task. Sheepishly, you turn to a more experienced colleague and ask for a lifeline.
OWASP Accepts Tool For Re-use, Acknowledges as ‘Best Practice’
When a team of ITX developers recently created – and contributed – a new integration to the Open Web Application Security Project’s (OWASP) threat modeling tool (Threat Dragon), they were simply living the company’s culture. Continuous innovation, thriving together, and giving back to the community are pillars of the ITX value system.
The integration automatically pushes open, non-mitigated security threats created in Threat Dragon directly into our Jira backlog. ITX contributed the integration back to OWASP because we know there are a lot of dev teams in our community using Jira to manage their product backlog – especially if they’re doing it in an Agile mindset.
OWASP has accepted the contribution, even acknowledging ITX as a “Company Collaborator” and posting the integration as a best practice on its website.
To those in the digital product space, the term “Discovery Phase” will likely wash over us like many of the other oft-touted buzz words of our industry. But a healthy discovery process allows us to understand product-market fit and identify key user needs. What’s keeping us from incorporating this valuable learning into our products? We believe it’s either ignorance, intuition, or inertia that stands in the way of successful discovery.
If you’re concerned about security now that your team is working remotely, you’ve been doing it wrong.
Even as the economy slowly reopens, the global coronavirus pandemic is forcing many businesses to ask employees to continuing to work from home. While system security is always a top priority, a number of clients have only recently shared their security concerns now that their folks are working remotely.
With the launch of the Vitals Update app, everyone at ITX Corp. is so incredibly proud to take a stand in the fight against novel coronavirus. We developed the Vitals Update software solution to enable healthcare professionals to monitor potential COVID-19 cases while patients report their symptoms from quarantine.
As a community, have we gotten better at product leadership? And if we haven’t, what’s it going to take to get there? The answer to both depends on who we ask and by what yardstick we use to measure our performance. For example, is there alignment between the big organizational vision and our individual product vision? Have we mastered the softer skills to bring together such a diverse group of people? And do our teams know how to think through complex problems and adapt when the ground shifts beneath them?
In this episode of the Product Momentum Podcast, Sean and Paul pose these questions to Richard Banfield, VP of Design Transformation at InVision. Richard’s natural curiosity provides some helpful takeaways:
The notion of high performance is not new; powerful examples exist in every industry and sector. Find one that works for you and imitate it.
Effective product people first need to be people people.
Building a practice of high performance requires us to teach our teams how to work together, think together, and decide together.
Our industry owes sticky notes a tribute.
Sticky notes have become a prized item in the product leader toolbox. We use them to brainstorm, sort, prioritize, vote, organize, group and rearrange everything from thoughts, domains, and problems to ideas, concepts and user stories. It is fair to say we would be lost without them in the product development world today.
We have learned a lot about how to use them and how not to use them along the way. Stick-note sorceresses, whiteboard wizards & flip-chart fortune tellers might improve their craft by learning from our misfortunes and innovations over the last couple of decades, so I am sharing them here.
