When is product innovation a hindrance?
When it is innovation for innovation sake?
Let’s look at a company known for innovation and great products –Google; they have it right – or do they? It seems to me that product companies have teams that create wonderful new products, (Gmail, Google Maps) and you eagerly await the next one…what is the issue with that you say? The issue is these teams seem to stay with a product and tweak it and tweak it and feature enrich it until it ends up worse with each release. The age old maintainability and reliability over complication leads to poor usability.
These days, more often than not your hear the street complaining about the latest version-“Why did they remove select all?”; ”The search on the new version is awful, where is my old search?”; “Why are they auto filtering my email? If I wanted it in that folder I would have set a rule up…” – all complaints due to playing with the old rather than innovating the new.
Let’s look for a moment to the Insurance market – remember years ago when “time to market” was big? What did they do? Tweak the PAS systems to the point you can set up a new product in three days – to what gain? You cannot create and file a product in that time so why be able to get the PAS updated so fast? And why do they continue to invest in that feature?
Tweaking an old PAS leads to less reliability and increased maintenance; shortening the lifespan and forcing large injections of capital to replace – Why? Why not invest the short term dollars in enabling your enterprise to grow, facilitate change. The new breed of PAS systems are built on real components, with disconnected services and messaging – the Component Architecture.
More and more vendors are building tools based on such an architecture, removing the heavy integration and allowing the evolution of an enterprise component by component. No more breaking the old by adding the new, instead a simpler, proven method of extending or replacing the old without the integration and conversion nightmares of the past.
Why do I say product extension and feature tweaking is a “one minute strategy”? Because just like most Enterprise Roadmaps we see today, this development and innovation model lack thought and lacks a strategic vision. Instead of taking a moment to right the ship and steer a course into calmer water, these strategies propagate tactical solutions that never reach to the nub of the issue. We do not all have $50M to spend to keep replacing so we need an alternative, a different mode and that mode is to embrace the new architecture, get ready for it and then be able to accelerate change.
So next time you look at your product or your enterprise, try to think out of the box and stop trying to make a steering wheel better – it is round and it works…..look for ways to integrate it better….allowing future growth and expansion without the growing pains.