The Challenge of Sustaining Disruptive Innovation When You Meet Success

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What is Sharethrough?

What is Sharethrough?

What is Sharethrough?

Innovate or die

*disruptive innovations not sustaining innovations

It’s easier to innovate in a successful startup

It’s easier to innovate in a successful startupFALSE!

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Support Existing Success Disruptive Innovations

Product & Engineering Resource Allocation

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Certainty of Revenue

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Support Existing Success Disruptive Innovations

Balancing success and disruptive innovation is especially hard for a startup

Here’s what we did

Identify the right resources based on their ability to aid your learning (vs scale)

Step 1:Create the Right Environment

Isolate and clear the schedule of your resources

Step 1:Create the Right Environment

Don’t promise to (immediately) revolutionize the business

Step 1:Create the Right Environment

Use internal customer development to develop initial hypotheses

Step 2:Set Goals and Boundaries

Aim to build an MVP that solves a simple business problem

Step 2:Set Goals and Boundaries

Build a usable product not just a hack - don’t skimp on design

Step 2:Set Goals and Boundaries

Keep the progress updates separate from the existing product workflow

Step 3:Milestones & Progress Checks

Use regular (weekly) customer meetings as release markers

Step 3:Milestones & Progress Checks

Re-assess high-level assumptions and hypotheses every 3 months

Step 3:Milestones & Progress Checks

My Learnings

Innovation is Hard

Re-do your customer developmentDon’t fall into old habits!

Don’t fall into old habits!Iterate differently

When you “finish”, have a transition plan in place

Be ready for disappointment and some pivoting

Robert Fan@rfanrob@sharethrough.com

Thanks!