Product's Role in Breaking Through Org Barriers

People like new ideas until those ideas disrupt their work. When innovation threatens the status quo, teams push back with that internal inertia.

Here's what I've learned about championing innovation and the upward battle against the resisting organizational inertia:

Stop involving those directorial minds who like to dissect a watch, gear by tiny gear. You have a new idea and are tempted to test its viability by getting compliance involved early on. Resist the temptation to avoid giving away 2 weeks of runway to a painstaking, granular examination where nothing escapes scrutiny.

Orient away from details. Think sniper, not shotgun. Convince leadership that an exhaustive process is unnecessary. Forget drowning in endless details. Paint just enough of the picture that your team jumps into action, skipping the marathon meetings and presentation purgatory. Your goal? Crystal-clear direction with zero bureaucratic fog.

Hunt for the organizational rebel – a high-ranking rule-bender who can connect invisible dots, and conjure budgets from thin air. Find the person who'd rather ask forgiveness than permission, and you've found your innovation ally. Some companies are ready for change and already have a leader who supports new ideas. Most aren't. If you are stuck in the snooze-mode, try bringing in a fractional executive who can champion your cause.

Don’t build trust; build alliances. You can't microwave team chemistry. It bubbles up slowly. Trust isn't built, it's brewed - one shared challenge, inside joke, and rescued project at a time. Trust is a luxury you can't afford right almost always. But alliances will let you zoom in on the treasure map of shared goals.

Make the rewards so crystal clear that teammates can see it as nothing short of victory - whether they trust you or not.

The need for a lab

Many large orgs have realized that the talent for maximizing current revenues is not the same as that needed to innovate for the future. Today, the smartest companies recognize the need for a third team: specialists who can convert promising ideas into sustainable, profitable businesses. An outside team working inside.

NOTE: Specific to building AI products, the lab mindset plays a key role in achieving product success as outlined in 4 New Realities for AI
Product Management.

Product as the Lab Manager

For this lab team to succeed it needs to be spearheaded by a function that has pre-existing relations both horizontally across the success, marketing, sales, tech teams and vertically from junior to C levels. If we want this lab team to really take off, we need someone who can juggle all these relationships and wear different hats without dropping the ball. Hats like:

Talent Profiler

You've already recognized that lab and HQ talent are distinct breeds. Your product team is uniquely situated to be able to handpick a lean crew across design, dev, and even leadership - pioneers who'll push boundaries with minimal resources to keep you ahead of the curve.

Cultural Shifter

While Product excels at finding product-market fit to drive sales, they're also uniquely positioned to build culture-market fit. Just as customers are drawn to what you make, both talent and clients should be magnetized by who you are. And who better to shape this than Product - they're already the bridge between your company's essence and your customer's world.

Strategy-Execution Gap Closer

The strategy execution gap is simple: it's the gap between your company's goals and what actually gets done. When markets moved slowly, top-down planning was perfect. But today's fast-paced world demands more than just sticking to outdated maps and barreling forward with rigid plans. There is a direct relation between this gap and the amount of ‘politiking’ needed in the org to get an initiative done.

Product closes the gap by removing the politics and doing one key thing no other functions can’t do. That is, simply decision making by aligning on a few basic trade-offs. Product can help skip the vague buzzwords like 'teamwork' in strategy. Instead, it can shift the focus on clear trade-offs: ' For example: choose 'collaboration over speed' for complex products, or 'growth over efficiency' when scaling fast. After all, the foundation of product management is a trade off game.