Hi friend!
Thanks so much for signing up for this new project, Meet The Market, which is all about innovation commercialization.
Have you heard this term before? Over the last year or so I started to wonder if it might be the right container to hold the work I do, the work you do, the work most of us do in tech.
The short answer: Innovation Commercialization Strategy is the work that goes into the work of designing a new user experience or a sales pitch or a landing page or feature.
It’s the positioning, customer definition, and problem space agreement that every team does explicitly or ignores. Done well, it’s the driver of every force-multiplying growth decision. Done poorly, it’s the cause of calendars full of painful cross-functional meetings to “get alignment.”
The long answer and the thesis I’ve formed in seeing how this work shapes hundreds of companies is this:
Every growth and alignment challenge a company faces in a growth stage is the result of a missed step during the innovation commercialization stage that came before it.
I first noticed a pattern over 10 years ago whenever I would join a new team.
“Hi, I’m Alli, I’m a copywriter, I’m here to help with onboarding. Tell me about your ideal customer?”
“Hi, I’m Alli, I’m a UXer, I’m here to help with your first time experience. How are you positioning your product?”
“Hi I’m Alli, I’m a product manager, I’m here to help you launch a new prototype and turn it into a giant revenue stream.”
The project would begin, I’d claim one of these departmental seats, and I would start asking questions like,
“Who is your customer?”
“What problem do you solve for them?”
“What does success look like for these people?”
“Do you have a way to measure that success?”
“Tell me about your product strategy.”
“Do you have documentation on your messaging strategy I could see?”
“What category are you in?”
“How are you positioning yourself within that category?”
“What documentation or evidence do you have on this customer, on this problem?”
“If I asked product and marketing to tell me about your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), would they share the same story? Point to the same reference materials?”
What I would hear in response would be some version of:
“Ma’am. We hired you to write 18 emails. Enough with the questions.”
No matter where I went in the org, no matter whether I called myself a copywriter or a UXer or a product manager, I asked questions to build the strategy for a growth project or initiative. I assumed someone who had been there longer than me would have defined the answer years before. But this was rarely the case.
So there I would find myself, asking busy leaders who hired me to ship a deliverable, solve a problem, or make a number go up to do something else. Namely, I’m asking them to stop, talk about their Ideal Customer Profile, Jobs To Be Done, and Positioning, to refine the product vision and strategy, to hone the messaging strategy, to get the team aligned, to rebuild the sales pitch to accommodate more stakeholders.
The surface I signed up to work on was product, UX, email, or web copy.
The deliverable I promised was a new onboarding experience.
But the work to design that experience is innovation commercialization strategy.
And precious few organizations charter their teams to do this foundational work, even fewer connect the strategy across departments.
The trend I’m outlining here is hardly unique to me.
Have you ever been in a position where your job is ostensibly creating a deliverable but the work you need to do involves a strategic layer not technically part of your charter but essential for your success?
Maybe you’ve been a mid-level Product Marketer with no invitation into the rooms where company strategy is defined. You’re hired to craft or codify the ICP, a challenging task but one well within your technical skill set. Then you have to somehow convince every person across the org to use your new definition instead of the one that a CPO says we should build for or a VP of Sales says we’re selling to.
Maybe you’ve been a Growth leader hired to design the Product Led Growth (PLG) flywheel. You’ve done it a few times by now, but every new org seems to have the same set of players you need to align before you can get anyone to agree to share intel before deciding what to build next or how to promote a new release.
Or maybe you’ve worn a Customer Success, Sales, or Partnerships hat and carried a quota number you know you’ll never meet if you can’t get your Product leaders to believe you when you say that we’re losing to competitors for the same missing compliance feature.
Or maybe you’ve even worn a hat called “Go to Market” but found yourself pigeon-holed into something like, “Just do demand gen” or, “Run these cold calls” without any actual semblance of go to market strategy that exists beyond the work you yourself can do.
Or maybe, just maybe, you’ve sat in a Founder’s seat, spent years understanding the problem you’re solving, developing a strong thesis on how you help people, worn each one of these hats, and still watched growth slow as you wonder how the heck all the pieces fit together.
So here we are. Each of us, sitting in our chair, accountable for the numbers in our little box, spending 75% of our time convincing colleagues sitting in other departments to see things from our POV so we can all get the same outcome.
What’s really going on here? A hidden Commercial Context Ladder that determines your team’s success
I’ve been stress-testing the working model that I’ll share with you here, which I’ve called the “Commercial Context Ladder”.
To reach successful outcomes at the top of the stairs, you need to climb the bottom ones first. Not alone, not “For marketing” or “for product” - together, across an org.
The success or failure of projects at the top of the stairs (aka the numbers that go up or stay flat or go down) are the result of the success or failure of the work done at the immediate stair below.
Sales pitches and copy converts as well as the words on the page, the words on the page are as good as the messaging strategy behind it, the strategy is only as good as the VOC and understanding of our JTBD and the ICP - and hardly any of this succeeds if we can’t agree on the problem space within which we’re operating.
The same is true on the “Experiences of Use” side of the house. Our usage metrics go up only as well as we’ve designed the experience, which is only as strong as the product strategy behind it and so on and so forth.
What’s also true is that many people understand the connection between the top layer and the next one down.
Even clients with a highly limited understanding of copy still usually agree with me more times than not that we needed a messaging strategy to back our words.
But the challenge I see so, so, sooooo many companies go through is that one layer down is where the investigation into stagnant growth stops. Leaders look at what’s happening at the top of the pyramid and only hire someone one step down. “Conversions on this page are low, let's hire a copywriter.” “New users don’t convert, let’s hire someone to own onboarding UX.”
This approach is not wrong. Even a wobbly strategy will improve by going just one layer deeper, at least for a while.
But the success we see from this approach is short-lived.
After a while, stagnation settles in again. Or maybe the company prepares to push its self-serve strategy into mid-market conversations. Or a new competitor gains traction and you lose your edge. Or some other inflection point leads a brilliant talented sharp person wearing a growth, product, or marketing hat to come in and start asking questions about the strategy, then probe deeper into the org to find that the rest of the layers are not there or are not there with the great clarity necessary to form a strategy.
You hire someone and say, “This person is our new product marketer and they are in charge of ICP definition.” But unless they are chartered to mobilize the ICP out across the org, the ICP is only linked to that person in that department.
The UX team has epic novels of VOC they will continue to reference before they even open the file for the product marketer’s ICP.
The marketer’s persona is an entirely different google spreadsheet with a list of traits and publications.
Everyone continues to use their own work
Everyone’s trying to “align” around 15 versions of the strategy.
No one is wrong. Everyone is right.
But what it feels like is that everyone else is wrong and no one is right.
So. What is to be done?
If the last 15 years have taught me anything, it’s that one does not simply waltz into a company and recommend a new ICP strategy or a re-org around JTBD or for teams across the aisle or say we want to “align” and have it happen in 1, 2, or 3 quarters.
But we also can’t pretend that the problems don’t exist, that they aren’t the root cause of our growth challenges, that fixing them won’t be the thing that turns us around.
So what’s the in-between?
The question I’ve been asking is when. When does it make sense for a team to chip away at some, if not all, of this innovation commercialization work.
What signals do we look for?
Is there a moment that’s too soon?
Is there a moment that’s too late?
What inflection points might present a natural opportunity to recommercialize our innovation?
And when you know you have a window, how do you start?
To me, the most exciting moment is when a company shifts from selling to one person to selling to 2 or more people.
One person equals one champion, one ICP, one JTBD. Even if you have multiple versions of that person, you still have one person, one decision, one person using one screen.
As soon as you have two or more, you have a political entity. You have a negotiation you’ll never see.
And you start at the bottom of the stairs and bring each person up to the top.
What does a compliance leader care about? What are their biggest problems? What are they looking for? How do you build experiences of purchase and use for them that are different from the ones you build for others? How do you measure what they care about? How do you get more of them on board?
Easy, right?
It’s as easy as it looks.
And it’s harder than it sounds.
Thanks for reading, more soon,
Alli