Pamela FurstSenior Manager, Customer Success

"What are we doing to innovate next year?" | Boardroom Translator (Ep. 4)

Name: "What are we doing to innovate next year?" | Boardroom Translator (Ep. 4)
Uploaded: 2022-02-24T15:00:30+00:00
Duration: 2 min 30 s
Channel: Pamela Furst
Description: In this presentation, the speaker walks executives through the underlying meaning behind common board‑level questions such as whether to build offshore…

24 Feb 2022 · 3 min

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2:30

In this presentation, the speaker walks executives through the underlying meaning behind common board‑level questions such as whether to build offshore teams, why R&D budgets appear small, why systems experience reliability issues, and what the board expects from processes like Kanban. The core insight is that boards typically have a dual focus: they need engineering to deliver the features that will meet sales targets for the coming year, while simultaneously demanding strategic, forward‑looking innovation to stay ahead of competitors. To satisfy both demands, the speaker advises a staffing model that allocates headcount to maintain existing services and deliver next‑year product commitments, and also reserves dedicated teams for exploratory projects that are not directly tied to current revenue. He stresses the importance of regularly demoing these exploratory efforts to make tangible progress visible, acknowledging that some experiments will fail – a normal part of innovation. By framing board questions in this way, leaders can proactively address concerns about offshore staffing, budget constraints, reliability, and process adoption, and demonstrate a balanced plan that covers both delivery and innovation.

Chapters

Should we be building a team offshore? Why is the R&D budget so small? Why is your stuff constantly going down? Kanban? What is that? What does the board really mean when they say this? What we're going to do today is actually we're going to walk through what they really mean when they're asking you those things. And once you know what they actually mean, like, what are we going to do about it? How are we actually going to get ahead of it, and how do we actually address it? So let's step back. What's the board actually thinking about? They're probably thinking actually about two things when it comes to engineering. One, delivering what things they actually need to sell. But the board's also thinking strategically and probably a little paranoid. They're thinking about, like, well, engineering needs to make these things actually deliver so we hit the sales numbers next year. But they're also worried, you know, passively that there will be some other thing out there that's going to out, like, surprise us with some bottoms-up feature, top-down feature, something that actually we didn't think of ahead of time. So the corollary there is that they want to make sure that we're staffed up while we actually have the capital to do these things. So not just to deliver what's the current customer base, not just to deliver what things we're actually going to need to sell next year, but they're actually thinking about, like, we want to be sure we're investing to out-innovate the competitor that we haven't met yet. That's what they're really pushing for. And they're really asking, are we staffing, are we hiring to actually go do that? You should make sure that when you actually talk about the team and the plans for next year that, like, hey, that there's a certain amount of people actually, you know, doing existing servicing, existing customers. We should make sure that there are headcount tied to delivering features that are going to need to, you know, hit for next year. But then also actually show that there's actually teams and people working on things that are innovative, that are actually, that aren't directly correlated to any of these things. And the last bit is probably you want to demonstrate that. That means probably demo those things on some regular basis to show that not just you have headcount tied to it, that you're actually making progress on some of these things. And it's okay if some of these things don't actually hit, right? That's the whole point of innovation. You're trying things out. Sometimes they stick, sometimes they don't, right? But it's important to actually demonstrate that you're actually doing that, not just have a budget that says so.