Hugh Molotsi

This post was first published on LinkedIn . Congratulations! You’ve just been placed at the helm of the company. Your years of hard work and accomplishments have been rewarded with this awesome new responsibility. Enjoy the moment but don’t spend too much time celebrating. There is much work to do and expectations are high. Your employees and shareholders are expecting you to drive growth and are looking to you for immediate answers. So what’s your next move? For inspiration, you might be looking at Steve Jobs’ triumphant return to Apple in 1997. At the time, it would be putting it nicely to say Apple was in the doldrums. The company was operating at a loss. Microsoft Windows was dominant. And to add insult to injury, Michael Dell when asked what he would do if he was running Apple said “I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders”. But that’s not what Jobs did. He started a period of spectacular growth by introducing a stream of innovative new products. I...

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 ...