Don’t let the product become the strategy

During her talk at ProductCon last week, Debbie McMahon shared a valuable advice that struck a chord with me, especially when it comes to creating innovative products within established organizations.

It all starts with the best intentions. We dive deep into understanding the problem space and come up with a potential solution to address these problems. If this solution is novel and exciting, we tend to promote it enthusiastically throughout the organization. Initially, there is a lot of enthusiasm, and soon enough, the solution is considered as the savior.

However, the problem arises when the solution becomes the only solution, and the product moves away from being a potential solution to being the strategy. This is when the product becomes the problem, and a lot of energy is spent fixing the solution. I recently wrote about the dangers of this in this post.

I believe many people who have worked in corporate innovation can relate to this story. So, how can we prevent this from happening?

The solution is to focus on the core problem or problems we are trying to solve and stress that our current solution is just one of many potential options available. By doing so, we can avoid anxiety creeping in and the solution turning into a problem.