II thought I'd play on the title from one of my favorite authors for this post. I'm up to my eyeballs right now helping one of my clients mold their products to fit a new category positioning. We've been spending the past couple of months heads down on this and the result is pretty exciting -- everyone is jazzed about the new category definition and the visioning about how it can springboard the company to own a greater share of the category. It is without a doubt one of the most exciting exercises I've been involved in for a long time.
But with change comes new challenges....in the world of brilliant engineers with DNA that says build everything to its fullest capability, I'm now introducing the notion of when "good is great" -- in other words, when do you just need enough of a certain feature or value bundle to make the cut.
I find this fun -- it's an education of sorts that goes something like this "if i only want a breadbox that holds bagels, how long and how much will it cost? We have an exciting product roadmap, but for many of these non-core (but necessary) additions, it's more the question of can you build it to be great quality but not the cadillac of the industry. It's a mindset flip for the brilliant R&D folks who've been trained their whole lives to build it best in class. The reason we have world class ideas is because inventors, scientists, and engineers have this in their DNA. But the challenge on the business side is to provide context to when and under what conditions the R&D investment is justified.
This is the next stage in the evolution of this company. Can it categorize it's investments -- core IP vs. non-core -- and can it build value that's just good enough in some cases vs. the current notion of "we'll build it because we can". And more importantly, can it step back and say "NO" to some investments because of the cost, time, etc.
We're about to engage in a discussion and education that disaggregates top quality from full featured. And that the customer impacts the definition of these things and not our own development capabilities. In essence, we're about to bring the R&D team closer to the front lines of the market realities.
I'll keep you posted as we navigate this over the next week. We're under a time crunch to make this happen so we can have some "Go/NoGo" decisions. This I believe hinges on the buy-in to scope the R&D projects to build "good enough vs. great".
Stay tuned....
Wendy
So what? who cares? why you?
www.wendykennedy.com
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