Overview
We developed viable strategies for an enterprise security company to monetise an existing feature. We moved from blank sheet to concrete, evidence-backed proposals. Beyond the immediate deliverables, the company gained new capabilities for future innovation, all achieved part-time over four weeks with minimal disruption to ongoing work.
The Challenge
I was approached for help in coming up with new products and business strategies for an software security company with customers in enterprise and government. Their current offering bundled a number of products together. One product in particular they wanted to develop into an independent product line, or at least independent revenue generator, was bundled in with the main suite, and had been kept at that kind of level - good enough for most people, but not really strong enough to stand on its own. It was an AI tool that identified malicious patterns, and isolated the risks.
So the challenge was to come up with ideas to enhance this product such that it could be separated out and sold on its own. We would touch on product features, technical capabilities, business model and competitive positioning. The current team was highly technical (e.g. data scientists).
We had 4 weeks to prepare, and this was work being done alongside day-to-day work in the company.
A Flexible Process that Maximises Outcomes and Learning
We agreed on 4 sessions - 1 per week - with independent work outside of these sessions to develop the ideas further. I was providing guidance and challenge, but the majority of the work was being done in-house. It was about building capabilities and leveraging the domain expertise of the existing team.
With a small group, highly engaged, with strong ownership it was well set up to make good progress. This focused approach, avoiding innovation theatre, allowed us to move quickly from concepts to concrete proposals.
Often people are put through structured training with a set curriculum and nicely prepared materials. This reduces costs to the training provider, and builds a shared understanding across a wide group. However, a generic process tends to be less time efficient for those being taught, and struggle to drive high quality outcomes. Here the process was more akin to personalised tutoring than mass classes with a standardised curriculum. Now business value would be reached faster, and in a way that is time efficient for the people working on the project ultimately given a larger ROI.
Covering All the Key Steps
To develop proposals that we could present to the rest of the business with both conviction and compelling arguments would take several steps:
- Ideation - coming up with ideas for new products / features / business models.
- Refining the ideas - take the rough ideas, develop and research further to understand if we should discard or double down on them.
- Prioritisation - taking a long list of ideas and picking our top candidates.
- Preparing for presentation - take the top ideas and create persuasive, evidenced arguments that they are worth pursuing.
However, it’s hard to know up front where to spend the most time. Were there already some well formed ideas? Should we skip over the presentation part quickly and focus on the other areas more? Coming to each session prepared to deal with a number of topics, rather than having a fixed curriculum, and bringing a breadth of experience allowed me to adapt around the most pressing challenges.
In this case, while there were a few ideas up front, it was clear that we needed to look at new sources for ideas. A common challenge is getting out of the mindset of doing more of the same, just a little better, which we all fall into when working on a product continuously. So we worked together to find different sources of inspiration and evidence:
- What are the customer’s needs when looked at from first principles?
- What is a potential subsection of the market that we could double down on, like Government or Finance?
- What sources of customer feedback are there? Sales teams? Customer support?
- What does the competition do?
From there they created a long list of ideas, which were further challenged for evidence of customer demand and feasibility of implementation. In discussion we went off on some tangents looking for new opportunities - while there is guiding structure, it’s still a creative, collaborative process.
A lot of ideas were good, but maybe a touch incremental. So we also spent quite a lot of time discussing how they might be packaged / bundled in a more saleable product or upgrade package.
Keeping flexible allowed for the right amount of focus to be put on the areas that needed it most, but with a fixed deadline, we kept in mind overall progress and ensured that we ended with a strong set of proposals, that could be argued for well and presented with confidence.
Challenging Organisational Assumptions
It’s common in companies to have those unwritten rules - “sacred cows”. We don’t do xyz, and that’s the way it is. Generally there’s a good original reason behind them - maybe it would too technically complicated, require more legal complexity or require a renegotiation with customers. Probably every new team member thinks it would be a good idea, but then they’re told not to go there. Quickly you’re dismissing the idea with barely a thought.
Every now-and-then, it’s time to challenge these common beliefs.
Here we danced around on such challenge. If you ran AI across a different data set, then you could detect more security threats. But this would increase processing load, require new techniques and access sensitive customer information. Potentially an almighty mess of business, legal and technical complexity. However, it was hard to see how you could be class leading without implementing it, and when we researched further, it turned out that competitors did use this technique.
The value of an external person is that they can challenge such assumptions, and force thinking to move from the habitual or emotional into the rational and can-do.
So here an awkward point became a focus of conversation and we left with the decision that this should be the top priority. If it gets solved, it would improve detection rates, and open up a whole host of potential features. It would make the product competitive as a standalone product. Further, with more investigation it became clear that many of the potential challenges were at least partially solved already, and others in the business had reduced the technical risk with small proof of concepts.
Implementing it seemed beyond the capabilities of the current team, but we could see a business case to justify it. Passing conversations with leadership confirmed a willingness to increase resources if needed. We had moved it from “don’t even go there” to doable in a few days.
Outcomes
The client started with a few rough ideas. By the end, the business was left with innovative proposals to develop the product and generate a substantial new source of revenue. These proposals were well argued so that they could be evaluated against competing priorities and other stakeholders could engage constructively to bring them to market.
They had gained new abilities to keep innovating going forwards. Skills to come up with new ideas, evaluate them and refine them. Not just considering technical features, but also market segments, and packaging features into saleable products. They understood their own company better and how to leverage its strategic advantages (sales team, customer base, brand, technology). The tools to communicate why each idea was valuable and to sketch a business case around them, and face the management scrutiny with confidence.
They’d built the confidence to bring up ideas that at first glance seemed unreasonably ambitious, but which we could now back up with clear evidence of the potential upsides, and many of the potential barriers to implementation removed.