Question: Are you successful if you develop a product with features that exceed the expectations of your customer?
Answer: Not if your customer can’t afford to purchase the device. Or the costs of making it bankrupt the business.
Success requires delivering the right product at the right time at the right cost or price.
Accomplishing this outcome is complex. Fragile tension between cross-functional colleagues easily snaps and becomes unproductive conflict.
Then, the complex becomes complicated.
Organizations that succeed know something failing companies don’t: You can’t engineer a system or process that drives the right data flow so all stakeholders operate with the same understanding of current and future state.
Systems don’t make decisions. Humans (still) do.
Therefore, bringing a product to market is a social process. In other words, success requires humans connecting with humans: having meaningful, candid, transparent, honest conversations in the flow of work.
