Product innovation

Integrated teams incorporate the unique perspectives and individual expertise of researchers, designers, strategists, and engineers—working in concert—to define and deliver custom software for clients. Unfortunately, at many technology companies, this often looks like each group is “taking turns” or worse, throwing their work over the proverbial wall to the next team.

Product innovation requires a shared understanding, diverse perspectives, interdisciplinary collaboration, and a focus on new value creation. At TXI, we’re pushing “dual-track agile development” even further. For us, these distinct capabilities are brought to bear in each phase of every project, regardless of size or scope. Our engineers are part of user research. Our designers extend into QA. Our strategists consider the entire lifecycle of a digital product’s development. And everyone is focused on building an innovative digital experience aimed at user adoption and value creation for the client. Ours is a much more holistic approach to software development and yields more consistent outcomes and impact.

Organizations struggle with product innovation for several reasons. They’re optimized for the business they have today. Their teams are streamlined and siloed for efficiency, focusing on daily operations and managing business as usual. Depending on their longevity and market dominance, they may also find comfort in being the industry incumbent and less concerned with smaller upstarts and indirect competitors.

Without a “burning platform,” they may simply lack the motivation or demand to consider new audiences, markets, products, or partnerships. And even when an organization is committed to doing something new (not just repeating the success of their last hit technology) it requires risk-taking and change management which are unfortunately synonymous with fear and pain. These feelings oftentimes overshadow the massive potential waiting on the other side of prospects and paradigm shifts.

Lastly, product innovation requires a different way of thinking and working—essential mindsets and behaviors that don’t come naturally to everyone and need to be cultivated, learned and practiced. If an organization doesn’t give its employees time, authority, incentive, and a “safe” environment to experiment and explore, it doesn’t matter how much its leadership talks about the need to innovate, it simply won’t take root in the company culture.

Product innovation isn’t a one-and-done event. It’s more than launching your MVP, entering a new market or category, winning industry awards for software excellence, or even unlocking new sources of revenue. Those are amazing milestone moments for our clients (and all certainly made possible through product innovation). Still, for us, product innovation “done well” is about fundamentally changing how an organization identifies opportunities, reframes its hypotheses and assumptions, and uses a more consistent and creative approach to solving peoples toughest challenges with software.

The payoff of achieving these higher order objectives looks different for every organization but has these hallmarks: there’s a shift away from outputs, the tangible expressions of the product or service, to outcomes—change in user behavior and impact to the organization. There’s an openness within the organization to new ideas, tools, and methods with an emphasis on rapid prototyping, user testing for evaluative feedback, and focused experimentation. And there’s a lasting cultural shift where imagining the future and exploring possibility isn’t just encouraged; it’s prioritized, incentivized, and viewed as a competitive advantage.

Yes! Our approach to successful product innovation is absolutely teachable. We believe any product team—struggling or not—can benefit from learning to work more collaboratively, creatively, and consistently. But first and foremost, it's important to understand that our approach focuses on mindsets and behaviors—ways of thinking about and engaging in the work—rather than specific tools or methods. It’s not that we don’t see tremendous value in a design thinking toolbox full of methodologies, skills and frameworks, but that without the foundation of our product innovation principles, teams are far less effective in applying those tools. And because innovation challenges are uncharted territory for teams by their nature, our approach offers a flexible, non-linear approach.

Once learned, these product innovation mindsets and behaviors can be leveraged throughout the product development process—from the earliest discovery work to late-stage testing, deployment and measurement. This helps teams stay nimble and responsive while minimizing waste and churn. Additionally, we coach executive leaders how to better cultivate innovation culture within their organization. From creating in-person and virtual workspaces that support collaboration and cross-functional exchange to establishing the psychological safety conducive to calculated risk-taking and experimentation—we believe a concrete commitment from sponsors and stakeholders is critical to product innovation taking root in organizations. So while there’s no “easy” step-by-step process for navigating the often circuitous path of product innovation, the skills to find clarity in the chaos are learnable by anyone.

Innovation doesn’t always mean “something revolutionary the world has never seen before.” In fact, developing improved versions of products or tackling new markets is often where our clients’ innovation journey with us begins! And because our approach to product innovation is behavior-based and focused on strategic, value-add activities, it can easily map to any client objective including their ambitions for an existing digital product or service offering.

Depending on your existing research, key performance indicators (KPI), and the impact you’re looking to make, we’ll tailor our teams, tools and timelines to best fit the nature of the work. That said, innovation problems (at any scale) aren’t formulaic—even when developing improved products . If you’re actually trying to do something new, that work is nebulous and can’t be addressed with cookie-cutter methods or project scope shortcuts. It may seem counterintuitive, but working with clients on their existing products, we often see riskier assumptions and more organizational orthodoxy—both of which can inhibit the divergent thinking required to best explore possibility.

So whether you’re looking to leverage a proprietary technology in a new way; introduce new features and functionality to your current product experience; tap into a new audience of users to improve an existing product; or reposition your offering to enter an all-new market—our design thinking mindsets and behaviors still apply. The rigor is the same as is the outsized value creation and impact.

The “best” type of innovation depends entirely on your purpose and intent. The business headlines are dominated by five top-performing names in tech, but that doesn’t mean you need to invent the next iPhone or launch a mixed reality offering this year to qualify as innovative. The truth is, our clients exist across a spectrum of productive innovation with the vast majority partnering with us on incremental innovation.

There’s a misconception that evolutionary improvement (incremental innovation) to one’s established product is somehow less desirable or notable than a revolutionary debut (radical/disruptive innovation). This simply isn’t the case. Doing anything new requires the same focus and fortitude: vision, definition, iteration, execution, measurement, and perhaps the most difficult for everyone—an openness to change.

To be clear, we’re adept at all scales and speeds of innovation, without judgment or agenda. Innovation for one client may involve us guiding their internal product teams in new ways of working that spurs fresh thinking, yields promising new ideas, and results in greater speed-to-value. Other times, innovation may be as straightforward (but just as vital) as us leveraging the wisdom of users to help a client build powerful new functionality for their legacy product suite. And for some of our clients, whose product innovation pipeline is more robust and sophisticated, we partner with them on long-term prioritization and management while accelerating near-term exploration.

Our approach is fit-to-purpose for every client regardless of where they are in their innovation journey or how familiar they are with activities like user research, rapid prototyping, experimentation pilots, and the build-to-learn philosophy of dual-track agile development. We enjoy helping our clients close the gap between ambition and reality—regardless of how big that gap might be—and believe engagements anywhere on the spectrum of innovation can be incredibly rewarding, meaningful, and important.

Innovation is a practice. To execute the development of new products consistently and continuously requires foresight, prioritization, and sustained commitment—all of which are born out of strategy. Understanding the influencers driving innovation is the foundation for building a successful strategy. When considering your innovation strategy, look to these five areas to help steer your approach:

1. Technological Advances How might new technologies be applied to your digital products, services, or organization to give you a competitive advantage?

2. Changing Market Needs Are you servicing today’s users with yesterday’s solutions? Chances are your competitors aren’t. Constantly evaluating market needs and staying on top, if not ahead, of them is vital to prevent disruption.

3. Strategic Intent What are your organizational goals? Are you looking to grow, diversify, liquidate? Tailoring your innovation strategy to these intentions ensures everyone is on the same path to success.

4. Intensified Competition Feeling the pressure from competitors? Startups encroaching into your space? Evaluating your innovation strategy to combat these threats may lead to new partnerships, positioning or defensive plays.

5. Changing Business Contexts: A global pandemic, supply chain disruption, workforce shifts, climate change, legislation…they’re all impacting what you can achieve. With so much out of your control, evaluating your business context and developing plans to address it is just as important as what you may innovate for your users.

Our clients count on our outside perspective and deep product expertise to enrich, guide and help manage their innovation strategy and innovation pipelines. Working across industries, markets, products, and services, we’re well positioned to leverage fresh thinking, analogous experiences, and deep learning to enhance any digital strategy and organizational context.

Certainly! We love an invitation to hear what people are dreaming up and are always interested in learning more about potential opportunities. We’re most helpful when someone is able to articulate a vision for the future, an outcome they want to realize, or an impact they desire to have on their business (or the world!) but where the path to moving beyond the ideation stage is unclear or unknown. That’s what we call “definitional delivery” an idea or problem statement requiring shaping, vetting, and potentially re-framing in order to define a clear path to shipping software capable of delivering on the promise of the original ambition or concept.

Before the first line of code is ever written, we’ll work with you to evaluate the idea against four lenses: desirability, opportunity, feasibility and reality. Using rapid prototyping, market research, competitive analysis, concept testing, and other evaluative methods, our consultants will validate the idea quickly to determine where the biggest opportunity to create new value exists—giving you the confidence you need to move forward (or pivot).

This process of opportunity identification; hypothesis testing, technical feasibility, and market viability de-risks your investment and increases the likelihood of success. It’s easy to establish a mutual non-disclosure agreement under which you can openly share your ideas and ambitions with one of our client partners or principal level practitioners. And when you’re ready to start building your innovative product, we’re standing by to help, every step of the way.

Developing an idea, product, or service isolated from understanding the user pain you’re solving or the benefit you’re delivering, means people are unlikely to adopt or buy what you’re building. We see the greatest market traction when research, design, product strategy, and engineering work as an integrated team to both reframe the problem and ensure the product is focused on actual customer needs. But interdisciplinary collaboration also allows for more tangible, measurable work—maximizing value (returns) for the investment (time and money). If you’re a startup, gaining traction depends on understanding how best to disrupt the incumbent.

Your product strategy relies less on how talented your engineers are and more on identifying how to position, price and market your game-changing offering to the relevant users. If you’re an experienced team, market traction requires you to focus on the current gaps between your product and user base. Are you designing features to hit business objectives you haven’t validated with users or shipping code because your competitors have it and you think you should too? Despite your development team’s talent, your industry expertise, or underlying technology, making assumptions about what potential customers want, relying on dated research, or taking aspects of the market for granted, inhibits teams from thinking creatively about what’s possible for the product and what’s next for the market.

Product innovation is about building new digital experiences that fundamentally change peoples lives or work. The most successful examples of product innovation look past merely “launching” or “shipping” a product and instead focuses on adoption (spread and reach) and continuous improvement (evolution and scale). And product innovation’s success is measured in terms of outcomes and impact, not the outputs themselves—which are ultimately a means to an end. For all these reasons, product innovation success relies more on culture than any proprietary technology or speed to market.

We build custom software using a set of six design thinking principles we believe are core to successful innovation culture:

• Empathy Know the needs, goals, and motivations of your users to ensure you’re maximally invested in solving the right problems for the users who need help most. Prioritize real-world, first-hand experiences over opinions.

• Tangibility Structure and visualize research data and undefined problems so they can be organized and addressed collaboratively. Identify patterns, taxonomies and insights to develop powerful, universal frameworks.

• Curiosity Question assumptions and challenge orthodoxy to identify and open up new possibilities. Ask critical questions and reframe what the industry takes for granted.

• Imagination Seek novel, notable experiences to spark thinking and experimentation. Draw relevant connections between new ideas and outside concepts. Make things tangible to share, test, and inspire others.

• Experimentation Test early ideas quickly and repeatedly for evaluative input and shaping from others. Look for new ways to learn and solicit feedback for refining ideas and improving solutions.

• Conviction Communicate and share often to move work forward and build belief in others and in the concept. Present ideas in ways that invites colleagues into the process and galvanize teams to take risks (and responsibility) for the outcome.

Every client engagement offers an opportunity to share our innovative culture and the way we work. Leading successful product teams of all sizes and experience levels, we’re eager to share our approach to innovation in project work and through hands-on client workshops.