A large established software development organization that has for years perfected incremental, enhancement driven innovation is likely to face challenges trying to launch a brand new version 1.0 product.Most of the processes and procedures designed to help the organization be better at improving mature product are detrimental for the success of a young baby product, which is like green grass struggling to grow through the layers of bureaucratic concrete laid on top of it. These processes and procedures are meant to drive the costs down and bring quality sustained at higher scale, across large customer base. These issues are in fact least of the problems for a version 1.0 product. As we recall, the main challenge for a brand new product is to secure incremental funding needed to build version 2.0, and there is no better way to achieve this than securing early adoption by a small number of prominent customers.
Just when the team needs sharp as a knife focus on one set of priorities, a large set of existing customers, a dream for many aspiring entrepreneurs, can pull the product team in a multitude of opposite ways. These customers and their sales account teams will do everything in their capacity to tilt the product team’s backlog prioritization in their favor.
On top of this all, the so-called "corporate tax" kicks in. On the one hand, large established organizations often come up with a list of well intended minimum compliance criteria for all the products they release (e.g. foreign language localizations, certain OS platforms, Section 508, FIPS-140, Common Criteria) and are not prepared to negotiate any exceptions for version 1.0. On the other hand, these organizations from time to time commit themselves to various initiatives and expect all product teams to comply (e.g. Agile software development, CMM framework, and certain development languages, protocols and tools).
These are just some examples, but collectively these and other types of unnecessary distractions add up to heavy burden that explains why so few new product innovations succeed at large corporations. As a product manager you have the opportunity to recognize these obstacles early and help guide your team around them.
