Are You Practicing Luckovation? | Stratos Product Development

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Are You Practicing Luckovation?

”I’d rather be lucky than good.” – Lefty Gomez, Pitcher, New York Yankees, 1930-1942

Is the success of your innovation projects based on luck? Would you rather your product development team be lucky or good? Being lucky in the things you can’t control is a wonderful thing, but relying on luck for the things you can control really isn’t the best strategy for your innovation efforts. So, is your development team practicing Luckovation? Here are few characteristics of “Luckovators” to help you find out:

Characteristic #1
Luckovators don’t fully understand the problem they are trying to solve, the need they are addressing or the value proposition of the product they are developing. If your team doesn’t completely understand these key elements, they are just relying on luck to hit the mark with your new product. Chances are high they will fall short, resulting in disappointment and lost opportunity in the market.

Characteristic #2
Luckovators implement the first solution they hit upon. They don’t explore the full solution space, analyze the alternatives or optimize their resources to provide the very best solution. The resulting products are just mediocre. With luck, the competition will also be practicing Luckovation and everyone can slug it out for market share with equally mediocre solutions. This is probably not the end result you were hoping for when you initiated the project to develop a new product.

Characteristic #3
Luckovators commonly make statements that start with “I believe” or “I think” or “It seems” or “We suspect.” They haven’t taken the time to do the research, get the data and execute the analysis so that they can say “I know.” If lucky, they will have the time, budget and support to pivot when they finally discover where they should be headed. Unfortunately, by the time this happens in the development process, the change in direction is expensive, has unintended ripple effects and consequences and puts hitting the window for market opportunity at significant risk.

Characteristic #4
Luckovators shotgun product features rather than create focused, extremely well-executed feature sets. Their favorite table shows the competitor’s products vs. features. The table includes a line for their new product which inevitably includes everyone else’s features plus a few additional features which they claim (believe, think or suspect) will differentiate and create competitive advantage. Time is generally not invested to understand which features customers consider “bloat,” eliminating those features and then applying the freed-up resources to better implement the remaining feature set. Rather, every conceivable feature is blindly implemented in the product in hopes of improving the odds of acceptance in the marketplace by every conceivable user.

Characteristic #5
When it comes to product development, firms practicing Luckovation typically have a laissez-faire senior management approach to the activity. These senior management groups typically do not understand their own product development process, how to manage it or the enormous potential the activity has to deliver growth. They don’t want to roll up their sleeves, get their hands dirty and participate, so they use the excuse that they are practicing “hands-off” management. One only has to look at the dirt under the nails of the Apple senior management team to understand the power of direct involvement to deliver growth, profits and end user and shareholder value.

Characteristic #6
Firms practicing Luckovation try to dictate and sloganeer their way to real innovation. “We are the innovation company, our employees are the most innovative in the world and innovation is in our blood!” Well, with lots of luck, real innovation just might happen in these firms…maybe. If you really want your team to be innovative, you better organize for it, build the right environment, diligently work to hire the right kind of people, incentivize them properly, create a disciplined process and get directly involved in making it happen.

Being aware of the above characteristics will help you remain watchful for infiltration by practitioners of Luckovation intent on letting chance needlessly play a role in the success of your innovation efforts. Further, by building organizations, teams and innovation processes designed to specifically address these pitfalls, you can reduce your dependence on luck and more predictably deliver truly innovative products to the market.

Thomas Kadavy
tomk@stratos.com
www.stratos.com

Stratos

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