Value Steam Discovery Part I

The debate that has raged on since the pandemic; personal productivity. I would argue that being in the office does not make someone more productive than working from home. In this LinkedIn audio event I'll be going over how to maximize personal productivity by the use of a KANBAN board.

The hype around AI is mind-boggling—more than the standard tech hype, which is saying something. Leadership is demanding to know what it means for their organizations. So what does it mean? Is this just the latest iteration of FOMO? How do you get answers?

Surviving and thriving in the digital world does not mean merely implementing technology. It also requires instilling new mindsets at all levels in the organization.The way people work needs to align with the speed, complexity, and uncertainty of today’s economic activity while solving real-world problems that benefit customers.The path forward is to create RAD organizations: resilient to endless disruptions, aware of changing market conditions, and dynamically adapting to create real value.

Will support function departments (HR, legal, finance etc) be replaced by AI?Instead of looking to replace these roles, however, leaders should be looking to evolve them.Technology has always automated tasks no matter collar of your collar. AI is merely the newest and perhaps the scariest, because we don’t understand its boundaries.HR teams, for example, don’t (or shouldn’t be) manually scanning through hundreds of resumes anymore to find a new candidate thanks to tech. AI might even make the process better.A growth-minded organization sees this as an opportunity to improve how HR serves its internal customers, however, not merely as a cost-cutting initiative.The extra time might be used by the HR team to discover ways of retaining employees, increasing happiness, improving collaboration, and so on; bringing “human” back into Human Resources.The same concept can be applied to all support functions.Evolve the roles so your people can have a more direct impact on the success of the organization.Will tech take jobs? Yep.Might it lead to job-creating growth? Surely, if you up-level the skills of those you’ve already invested in. In this LinkedIn Audio event special we talk about the uncertainty these roles face and what leveling them up looks like so they can have a deeper impact on the organizations they work for.

Brant Cooper talks about what it takes to complete rapid experiments and how it can be the fast track to overcoming uncertainty. The goal is to separate what customers will do vs what they say they’ll do. Too many entrepreneurs and corporate product people rely on “positive feedback” to make decisions. Countless hours and dollars are wasted assuming they know what their customers want based on little to no evidence. With rapid experimentation, customer behavior is a key part of the process. If you'd like to download our Rapid Experimentation Board for free DM me on LinkedIn: Brant Cooper: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brantcooper/

Brant Cooper discusses what does innovation truly mean and why do so many organizations fail at it? The overly-used buzzword often means something different to different members of the organization. It needs to be defined by the organization and then shared with everyone.👉What is the expected output of innovation?👉What are the desired outcomes?👉Who is responsible?👉What is out of scope?While “innovation” might be one method of achieving priorities and goals, having an innovation mindset is required no matter the pursuit.The innovation mindset is characterized by behavior reflecting learning and exploration. It’s how to deal with uncertainty.

The Value Stream Discovery Loop is a customer-centric approach to value creation. It helps businesses understand what their customers need and how they can provide value to them in an efficient, value-enhancing way. At its core, this is accomplished by looking at a customer’s lifecycle journey from their perspective. The journey can be broken down into seven states that a customer goes through: Awareness, Intrigue, Trusting, Convinced, Hopeful, Satisfied, and Passionate. Each state has a customer behavior that indicates what state they’re in and at least one high level business activity required to get the customer to act out that behavior. Think: “Call to Action (CTA).” Generally, you measure the # (or %) of customers who act on which CTA.

It’s likely you’ve heard the term “Value Stream” tossed around quite a bit without much context or definition. This is a shame, as creating greater efficiency without understanding an organization’s value streams is likely to result in decreased efficiency. A value stream consists of all the steps or processes an organization goes through to deliver a product or service to the customer. But, it should go further than that. It should describe all the activities an organization does to create value for customers and other stakeholders. This includes all the activities done to develop, market, sell, deliver, and support the product outside of product creation, like manufacturing. After all, if a customer never hears of a product or can’t take delivery of it, it never creates value for them. A product’s value stream provides an opportunity for organizations to identify inefficiencies, redundancy, bottlenecks, and other types of waste in their processes. Unlike most company cost-cutting efforts, mapping, analyzing, and improving the value stream leads to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, reduced costs, and increased profitability, without sacrificing value creation.

Value streams are all the activities an organization does to create value for customers and other stakeholders (usually within a specific product).“Lean” practitioners help you map your workflows, so you can see how to improve them while maintaining value creation.But what if the value isn’t there?Or you’re creating a new product? Or “innovating.”How can you discover your value streams?

Product management dates back to the 1930s with the concept of “brand management” pioneered at Proctor & Gamble. The memo that started it all sounds more like modern product marketing than product management, but your mileage may vary. Others point to 1990s Microsoft, which introduced the role of a “program manager.” The program manager was part of the Engineering department. It was their job to ensure all aspects of the product development process were aligned and working together. Program management was steeped in technical processes, but also considered how product decisions would impact the product’s end users. The best recap I dug up on how modern product management evolved is by Aakash Gupta. At the very least, it resonated with my experience. I’m buying that modern day product management, regardless of its origins, began at Hewlett Packard. The primary function was to serve as the bridge between Engineering and Marketing. For a readable version click here: https://movestheneedle.com/blog/the-rise-of-product-management-2/