Give me the fruit: going beyond good product ideas.
Part 3- Bridging the gap between business and IT- the key element for launching innovation.
Let’s pause and imagine this: you are standing in front of stretches of barren fertile lands. In your hand, you hold a special seed. This seed is no ordinary seed, it is a carefully thought out well-planned seed, an idea of a delicious fruit the world needs. It contains all the information on how the fruit should look, what should be its size, color, texture, and taste.
You are excited and turn to the farmers handing them the seed with an expectation to soon reap the benefits of the fruit.
However, for the seed to turn into a fruit it needs to first build a strong architectural root system to drive all the nutrition, grow a strong bark to sustain a successful transfer of this information, develop branches to transfer this nutrition in the right format & quantities and eventually be able to produce fruit. That as you can imagine, is indeed a time-consuming process. Anyone expecting the seed to turn miraculously directly into fruit is in for a big surprise.
The same holds true for bringing any product idea to life. The process of coming up with a new concept, documenting it, aligning all the stakeholders, defining the foundations on which it will be built, and shaping it to the form and functionality required, is a long and meticulous process that requires not only patience but also early planning. It demands consideration for each phase of building a product and the associated bare minimum time.
In the last articles we spoke about the importance of (a.) Improving communications and (b.) Cultivating tech empathy. This article is dedicated to the last pillar (c.) Managing expectations, of the series “Bridging the gap between business and tech: key for launching innovation”.
If you are like any average tech company, you know the importance of “user empathy” and place high importance on design thinking. While designing good mobile applications or websites, you spend enough time, often months to research what the product should look like and how the consumer should experience it.
That’s all fine but here’s when things start getting complicated. After months of contemplation, the product vision is clear and UI is ready. Knowing that the cost of delay is high and launch is time-critical, you turn to the IT teams and request them to bring those screens to life. It’s been months since the project has been launched, the stakeholders are getting restless and the product needs to go live asap!
The responsibility now falls on the shoulders of the tech teams, who are expected to deliver new products in lightspeed. But Alas, they are not superhumans. Quel dommage!
It’s no surprise that often tech teams fail to fulfill such tight timelines and disappoint stakeholders who have been eying an early product launch. However, in hindsight, is it really the fault of tech teams or a failure of having realistic expectations?
Having rational delivery expectations and understanding the different components/phases involved is important while planning the overall roadmap for product launch. It’s nice to have a good product idea but it is rudimentary to also have a basic understanding of what it takes to bring this idea to life.
When a project is kick-started and is in the ideation phase, it’s crucial that the team responsible for leading the launch accounts for the work that would be required across the eco-system and that each stakeholder understand the dependencies and overall workload. This would ensure that expectations are set right from the beginning and avoid non-timely pressure on each team involved.
The responsibility of managing expectations does not fall only on the shoulders of business teams but equally on tech teams. Tech leaders must not succumb to the pressure and communicate unachievable delivery timelines. It can be helpful to make the stakeholders understand the tech process and the expected workload from an early stage to manage their expectations.
Last but not the least, avoid novice mistakes and do not rush to give timelines. Make sure you have taken a margin for testing and bug-fixing when calculating the estimates. These few mindful checks will help you avoid over-promising and set reasonable expectations.
So there we have it, the key ingredients for creating harmony in two crucial teams, business and technology. Cohesion between these two functions of a business is the secret sauce for sustaining a consistent cadence for delivering innovation. All you need to do is (1) Improve Communication, (2) Cultivate Tech Empathy and (3) Manage Expectations. It might seem rather elementary on the surface however, each of these topics has its peculiarity and nuances that are not to be taken lightly.
Hope this series helped you dive deeper into each of these aspects and gave you a fresh perspective and a multitude of ideas for your journey towards delivering continuous innovation. Good luck!
