Staying Aligned: Protect Your Product Development in an Enterprise Org - Dan Toma

Product Innovation Series with Aram Melkoumov

About Dan

Dan Toma is a founding partner at Outcome, a consultancy that helps large companies navigate innovation for the future while maintaining the health of their core business. An entrepreneur with a startup orientation, he brings a blue-chip depth of knowledge that spans the full spectrum of established industries. Co-author of "The Corporate Startup: How Established Companies Can Develop Successful Innovation Ecosystems," Dan is a seasoned guide who leverages the ecosystem approach to digital transformation and innovation. Among his clients: Bosch, Jaguar Land Rover, Deutsche Telekom, Bayer, John Deer and Allianz. He has also worked with government bodies in Asia and Europe to augment development capabilities and implement national business acceleration strategies noted for their innovative vision. His most recent book is "Innovation Accounting: A Practical Guide for Measuring Your Innovation Ecosystem's Performance."

Key Takeaways

0:00 | Introduction to Dan Toma, including his professional bio and thoughts on browsers.

1:36 | About Dan’s recent book, "Innovation Accounting: A Practical Guide for Measuring Your Innovation Ecosystem's Performance."

3:28 | The Innovation Accounting system is useful for telling the story of an entrepreneurial venture before the hard data indicators are fully available.

4:00 | Dan provides a first-hand account of the importance of aligning your product with corporate strategy to protect against being dropped for amorphous reasons.

6:03 | Dan’s personal experience working with “Zombie” products that were dropped amidst a leadership change that left a bullseye on product development. The reason given not only to stop financing the product but to kill the product altogether was a vague “lack of alignment.”

8:54 | It’s not uncommon in Dan’s practice to see accelerators flounder when their labs aren’t aligned with internal corporate strategy, leaving project orphans with no internal champion or home at the end of the process.

10:40 | Beware false assumptions that can leave you out of step as a product owner with the overall corporate strategic umbrella.

11:33 | Defensive strategies: Ensure you have internal corporate sponsorship and understand the strategic shifts likely to occur in the near- and medium-term. If your development road map for a combustion engine extends beyond the deadline for eliminating combustion engines … You have left yourself in a precarious position.

13:36 | It’s incumbent upon corporate culture and governance to establish transparent strategic plans, widely accessible for internal and external innovators with product development ideas.

15:41 | Strategy and sponsorship are key when it comes to establishing an initial stake. Then your results can start to speak for your value-add.

16:30 | The importance of stakeholder management. If you are a product owner within a large organization, your startup orientation within the larger organization is key. Who are your influencers, champions and where do they stand? It’s up to you to gauge information flow and cultivate those relationships.

18:49 | Innovation metrics must evolve as projects evolve, adjusting expectations and performance evaluations based on the changing playing field.

20:52 | It’s important to look at both process metrics and results metrics. One impacts the other, and it’s all too easy to mislabel key indicators and distort the actual landscape.

24:20 | When your development process doesn’t exist out of the gate? Consider it good fortune. No one is going to hold you accountable to a legacy expectation and you are in a position, along with your product team, to optimize your own product innovation processes.

25:25 | If you have an opportunity to establish your own product development process, look outside the building. Have a conversation, read the books, read the blogs, attend the conferences and do it better than it has been done before!

25:44 | Where to find Dan’s books. His first book, “The Corporate Startup,” can be purchased here. His latest offering will soon be widely available in North America with more information available immediately at the Innovation Accounting website.

Contact Dan
Website: www.innovationaccountingbook.com
@LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dantoma/