Three Ways to Balance Innovation and Focus
Michelle Bacharach, CEO and Co-Founder of FINDMINE, shares her process for staying innovative without losing sight of the bigger picture.
Innovation is the lifeblood of startups. However, our investors often remind us that “more startups die of indigestion than starvation,” so living by the mantra “innovate or die” now has to be coupled with “don’t innovate too much or die.” Loss of focus in a small startup is a real challenge. In order to keep our eyes on the prize, here’s what we practice to achieve the optimal innovation mix:
1 Quarterly roadmap planning
This short term roadmap process is led by our Product Lead, who does a company-wide brainstorm (excluding management). We start with divergent thinking by asking everyone to spend 10 mins generating as many ideas as absurd or unrealistic as humanly possible. Then we move into convergent thinking where we group the ideas into similar buckets and talk through each. When evaluating a long list of great ideas it’s commonplace for many to fall into the same bucket for impact vs effort, so we break these “ties” by adding a lovability score. Once we have a stack ranked list, our Product Lead works with stakeholders of each idea to hypothesize positive business impact and level of effort with the tech team. Recommendations are then made to the management team and the roadmap is finalized for the quarter. There is no assumption that just because we started work on one thing it should automatically continue into the next quarter. It’s meant to be clean slate, but because it is quarterly these initiatives we decide we want to work on must be checks our technology team can cash.
2. 6-year and 12-month strategy mapping.
We have a 6-year revenue goal and a 12-month goal that are each tied to the processes, activities, and talent we need to achieve them in what’s called a Strategy Map. Our executive coach guided us through this process. (Feel free to reach out if you’d like an intro to her.) These are the things we should be working on, and by definition, the things we shouldn’t be. This makes it really easy to say YES and shift priorities in our short term roadmap if a customer brings us a crazy idea that they’re willing to pay for because it aligns with a strategic priority for the company. Even though it’s never easy to pass up on ideas, this makes it easier to say no if a great opportunity comes up that’s not aligned. One of the scariest things I did was say “no” to working with a customer that was ready to pay us because they were out of our geographic and sector focus when we were very early. If I had said yes, our resources would have been taxed with that client and we would’ve missed out on the two company-making clients we closed shortly after that.
3. CEO crazy think time.
I try to allocate about 15% of my time on future stuff: thinking about how big swings in the industry, geopolitics, startup fads, etc. will impact our business. I recently met a guy who was focused in some areas really far back in the supply chain from where we play, but because his work and trends were really interesting I set aside an hour for him to brainstorm with my management team about what it would look like taking our tech to that part of the industry. We may never act on the outcome of that meeting, we may shift our whole company to pounce on that opportunity, or we may do something in between. What we do will depend on where it lines up in each quarter, year, and 6-year period with our goals and strategy. Carving out the time to think this long term (2–10 years) means I can constantly be picking the right priorities for our shorter term roadmaps without having huge blind spots.
Michelle Bacharach is CEO and Co-Founder of FINDMINE, a software platform that uses machine learning to scale product curation for the world’s top fashion brands. As a product and strategy expert, Michelle is experienced in growing companies by launching software, apps and websites to millions of people, putting together joint ventures, and conceiving of new products. Michelle has shared her expertise with thousands of leaders in retail and technology as a speaker at SXSW, the National Retail Federations’ Retail’s Big Show and Shop.org, Intel’s Shift, Women in Machine Learning and Data Science, and many others. She has an MBA from NYU Stern and a BA from UC Berkeley (Go Bears!), where she wrote her honors thesis on managing innovation in multinational organizations.
