Hugh Molotsi

This post was first published on LinkedIn . One of the trickiest concepts from the Lean Startup Methodology is the Minimum Viable Product. In our experience training and coaching teams, we’ve seen lots of confusion. Part of the challenge is that the moniker “Minimum Viable Product” seems to convey diametrically opposite goals. “Minimum” indicating build as little as possible so you don’t waste time or effort. “Viable” indicating that you need to build enough to make the experiment realistic enough that customers will believe they are responding to an authentic product experience. Furthermore, “Product” indicates a level of completeness or refinement in what is presented to customers. Eric Ries’ shorthand guidance for MVPs is to start off with what you believe is needed in the MVP. Then eliminate half the features. Then eliminate half the features again. His point is that we all tend to design in much more functionality than what is actually needed. The guidance we g...

This post was first published on LinkedIn . In an earlier article, we made the case that Experimentation Gives You Innovation Superpowers and that companies with a culture of experimentation empower employees to innovate. Our example was Google who has maintained their search engine dominance by continuously raising the bar on search. Google has built infrastructure and tools to make it easy to run experiments that keep making their search engine better. Now your reaction might be - “But that’s Google! They have tons of money so of course they can afford a culture of experimentation and all the technology investments required to sustain it.” Well, your company may not be as big as Google but you probably can’t afford to not have a culture of experimentation. Making product decisions that rely on gut and opinions is not a recipe for long-term success. The good news is that any company without much more than a curious mindset can start experimenting today. In Eric Ries’ The Lea...

The following post was first published on LinkedIn . In a typical big company, the employees pushing the envelope on innovation could have an adversarial relationship with the legal department. Some innovators will even try to fly under the radar fearing the lawyers will put a kibosh on their project as soon as they get wind of it. When they ultimately have to get legal sign off, they anticipate a contentious meeting which will likely result in long delays making them wish they were working in a startup. So, it might come as a surprise that at the 2013 Lean Startup Conference , Intuit’s CEO Brad Smith , General Counsel Laura Fennell , and myself (at the time VP of Innovation) were on stage talking about how we collaborated on innovation. How was it possible that the people you expected to be frenemies would be BFFs (best friends forever)? It starts with Intuit’s approach to innovation. Instead of consigning the job of innovating to a few geniuses, at Intuit innovation is ever...

This post was first published on LinkedIn . At Amazon, all senior leaders are required to take two days of customer service training every other year. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in this fireside chat describes one experience he had while being trained. Bezos was taking calls from customers and had an experienced customer service agent listening in and available to jump in if he needed help. On one particular call, as soon as the customer’s order appeared on the screen, the experienced agent leaned over to Bezos and whispered “She’s going to want to return that table”, pointing to one of the previous orders. Sure enough, the customer told Bezos “I want to return the table”. It turned out the top of the table was scratched because it had been packaged poorly. After handling the return and finishing up with the customer, Bezos turned to the agent and asked “How did you know that the customer was going to return the table?” “Oh that table always gets returned,” replied the agent. W...

This post was first published on LinkedIn . There have recently been several incidents reported of black customers of Airbnb being denied lodging.  Particularly disturbing was this story involving a host in Charlotte that was so egregious it elicited a response from Airbnb’s CEO. Sadly, there have been enough of these stories that #AirbnbWhileBlack is now a trending topic. How much should we hold Airbnb accountable for these problems? Haven’t they strongly condemned racism and published an anti-discriminatory policy which all hosts are supposed to abide by? Shouldn’t we just chalk up these incidents as Airbnb reflecting the sad state of bigotry in our country and that in spite of all our progress, we still have a long way to go? I propose there is much more that Airbnb can do to address these problems and that we should expect no less. I say this even though I’m a huge fan of the Airbnb story.  The hustle and creativity Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia exemplified in ...

Sorry, we don't sell tulips. You're the fifth person to ask today. Team, what are we going to do about the stagnant revenue from our flower shops? This post was originally published on LinkedIn . A very common scenario in corporations is when senior leaders realize the business is facing challenges the company is not on track to overcome.  They decide they need to take a step back and re-examine their strategy.  At this point they will typically hire an expensive consulting firm to help them work through their new strategy.  The consulting firm works for several months gathering data, interviewing employees and customers, and eventually delivering their recommendations.  When the turnaround strategy is unveiled with much fanfare, many employees are unimpressed – “We already knew this and it wouldn’t have cost the company millions of dollars if they had just asked us.” Because many employees have a front row view of customer and product issues, they ...

This post was first published on LinkedIn . Jeff Zias and I are writing the book Grassroots Innovation in the Enterprise to be published this fall. In March, we published a blog post where we introduced a draft of a model to help assess innovation programs in the enterprise. To review, the model included these four facets: Freedom – Employees are given autonomy to explore ideas they are passionate about. Time – Employees are given self-directed time, carved out from their day jobs, to work on their own projects. Collaborative Culture and Tools – Employees can easily find out what other employees are working on in their self-directed projects, provide feedback, and form teams across organizational and geographic boundaries. Funding and Support – Employees are given resources, tools, training, and senior leadership mentoring to develop their self-directed projects.  A formal process is in place allowing projects to “graduate” to officially funded initiatives. W...

The following article was published on LinkedIn Even though just about every company purports to care about innovation, not all companies are equal.  Some companies have innovation superpowers - that is, they consistently deliver breakthrough innovations making life next to impossible for would be competitors. Google is one such company that seems to possess innovation superpowers, especially when it comes to their money-printing search engine.  Since Larry Page and Sergey Brin invented the PageRank algorithm and launched their company in 1998, Google became the search engine of choice, a mantle they haven’t relinquished in the almost two decades since.  This is not because people haven’t been gunning for Google. They’ve managed to keep raising the bar on their search engine in a way that competitors haven’t been able to match. Panama Take for instance the story of Project Panama. This story starts in June 2000, when Yahoo!, not realizing the strategic si...

The following article was published on LinkedIn Perhaps the most under-utilized assets in most companies are the ideas in their employees’ heads.  As many companies strive to be more innovative, jump-start their stagnant growth, and improve employee engagement, they overlook one fundamental truth: Frontline employees are more likely than senior executives to come up with game-changing innovations .   This is because frontline employees are more likely to be working with customers and working on the products that customers use.  Executives are more likely to be spending most of their days in meetings with other executives.  The every-day experiences of frontline employees provide them the insights on unsolved customer problems and ideas for better solutions. The evidence of these “hidden assets” is most apparent when employees leave a company to launch their own startup to turn their ideas into products.  In many of these instances, these start...