Creating Successful Products in a Corporation

How do you go about improving your chances of creating a successful product in a corporation?

Have you ever tried to create a new digital product in a large corporation? You have? Well then, you know it’s damn hard! And if you haven’t…it’s damn hard!

In a modern corporate environment, it is a huge challenge to build a digital product that is commercially viable, technically feasible and irresistible to customers. Business priorities change, often lack of strategy, competing egos and dependencies cause frustration. In addition, the Waterfall Model of product development itself can derail your product. All of this is likely to result in slow death of the product into which you’ve poured your heart and soul.

For instance, if you want to create a successful product, you'd need to “get out of the building” to talk to real customers and validate problems and ideas. Large organisations have research teams that run focus groups and analyst teams to gather and interpret insights.

The product team should have access direct access to customers and all of the internal resources.

Unfortunately, this usually comes with a set of challenges that the product team has to face.

In this series, I’ll cover the most common obstacles faced by the product team in a large corporation. Even better, I’ll provide recommendations on how to overcome them:

• Forget the business problem...for now
• The benefit of a small product team
• Remove dependencies

Let’s go!