Minimalist Innovation

Technology solutions designed for today, built for tomorrow.

Tag: BeyondDigitalTransformation

The real question is “How can we build innovation on a foundation of stability?”

Scaling mature products while fostering innovation isn’t just a technical challenge – it’s a strategic one. CTOs often find themselves torn between driving change and ensuring the reliability of core systems. The key lies in clarity – defining the right kind of innovation, aligning it with strategy, and creating an environment where stability and innovation fuel each other.

 

Below is a checklist to help you balance innovation and stability while fostering sustainable growth.

✅ Tailor your innovation goals: Choose the innovation type (Kaizen, disruption, or new models) that aligns with your business strategy and embed change engineering practices.

✅ Leverage strengths: Modernize legacy systems incrementally to retain stability while driving innovation.

✅ Simplify through architecture: Use reference architectures to streamline scalability and minimize risks.

✅ Adopt a team topologies approach: Align team structures to enable collaboration and seamless innovation.

✅ Tailor the innovation your strategy demands

Tailor your innovation approach to align with your business strategy. Use incremental innovation (Kaizen) to optimize systems, disruptive innovation for game-changing breakthroughs, or business model innovation to open new opportunities. Embed change engineering practices from the start to ensure seamless adoption. An inquiry for your thought: How can you build on that success to amplify future outcomes?

▢ Analyze your strategic priorities to identify the right innovation type.

▢ Evaluate market demands and customer pain points.

▢ Plan for change management by embedding change engineering into product or service design.

✅ Preserve what works well

Don’t start from scratch. Build on reliable systems, workflows, and tools that already deliver value. Modernize incrementally to avoid destabilizing your core operations. An inquiry for your thought: How can your strengths and processes power your future innovation?

▢ Identify systems and processes that form the backbone of your success.

▢ Upgrade legacy systems gradually to maintain stability during transformation.

▢ Look to past successes to inform your approach to change.

✅ Simplify your architecture

Architecture teams can act as enablers by designing reusable reference architectures that reduce complexity and ensure scalability. By aligning innovation with architectural patterns, CTOs can create an environment where experimentation thrives without disrupting stability. An inquiry for your thought: How can your architecture team amplify growth and reliability?

▢ Standardize reusable architectural frameworks to support innovation at scale.

▢ Align architecture decisions with business goals to reduce friction.

▢ Implement modular designs to test and iterate without disrupting core systems.

✅ Adopt organization structure that support innovation

Adopt modern approaches like Team Topologies to structure teams for collaboration and innovation. Replace silos with stream-aligned teams, enabling teams, and shared platforms to foster alignment across the organization. An inquiry for your thought: How can your team structures evolve to better support innovation and growth?

▢ Structure teams around value streams to reduce bottlenecks and silos.

▢ Facilitate cross-functional collaboration to harness tribal knowledge.

▢ Encourage psychological safety and experimentation across all levels of the organization.

 

Innovation and stability aren’t opposing forces – they’re complementary. Are you ready to align strategy, strengths, and structure to drive sustainable growth?

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From chaos to clarity: The power of disciplined execution

We introduced the concept of Change Engineering, in our last blog post, as a structured approach to drive innovation by aligning people, processes, and technology. In this blog, we provide a recipe for success with Change Engineering, highlighting the interplay of essential components and their importance in driving structured growth, long-term vision, disciplined execution, and a commitment to excellence.

“Software development is a discipline of discipline .”

– Steve McConnell (Author of Code Complete)

The building blocks of disciplined innovation

Success in innovation requires more than great ideas—it demands a cohesive framework where every component works in harmony. From understanding customer needs to crafting robust architectures, each element plays a critical role. When aligned, these components create scalable, impactful solutions. When neglected, they lead to inefficiencies, missed opportunities, and unsustainable growth.

 

Component
Definition
Example
Deliverables
Outcome,
if ignored
Need

Understanding customer pain points to address core problems.

A document fraud detection SaaS realized customers wanted full solutions, not fragmented parts.

Market research, user interviews, problem definitions.

 Solutions fail to meet real customer needs, leading to low adoption.
Strategy

High-level plan defining business goals and how to achieve them.

Decided to provide full solutions through strategic partnerships.

Vision statements, measurable goals, aligned initiatives.

Teams build misaligned features or over-engineer solutions, wasting resources.
Business Model

Framework for creating, delivering, and capturing value.

Integrated core strengths (Computer Vision Models and Decisioning Engine) with partner solutions for predictable transaction-based revenue.

Revenue models, pricing strategies, value propositions.

Solutions fail to generate sustainable revenue.
Service Design

Designing processes that deliver seamless service experiences.

Developed onboarding and offboarding processes for tenant channels and white-labeling support.

Process workflows, service blueprints, user experience plans.

Business operations cannot scale with growth, leading to inefficiencies and failures.
Solution Architecture

Technical blueprint for implementing the solution.

Introduced multi-tenant deployment models, leveraging cloud (AWS, Azure) documentation for scalability.

High-level system designs, technical specifications.

Technical debt accumulates, making future updates costly.
Reference Architecture

Reusable framework guiding consistent and secure solution design.

Used cloud (AWS, Azure) reference architectures and built IP-specific decisioning engine frameworks.

Framework templates, compliance checklists, reusable assets.

Long-term sustainability is compromised, increasing delivery timelines and creating inefficiencies during transitions.
Customer Scenarios

Detailed descriptions of user interactions with the product or service.

Connected scenarios to the Jobs-To-Be-Done framework to ensure alignment with user needs.

Journey maps, use cases, user personas.

Solutions miss the mark for end-user needs.

Change is inevitable, but chaos doesn’t have to be. Change Engineering provides the clarity and structure needed to commit to excellence.

Ready to engineer change with sustainable a foundation for success? Visit our Beyond Digital Transformation offering to learn more.

Customer progress is your growth catalyst

In a world driven by rapid innovation and shifting market demands, staying connected to your customers’ evolving needs is not optional—it’s essential. Understanding consumer progress requires delving into the forces that drive and resist change. The Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) framework, particularly the Four Forces of Progress, provides a powerful lens for analyzing why people adopt new solutions and abandon old ones. As described in the Jobs to Be Done Radio podcast, these forces include:

  1. Push of the Current Situation: The dissatisfaction with the current state.
  2. Pull of a New Solution: The allure and promise of a better future.
  3. Habit of the Present: The comfort and familiarity of existing solutions.
  4. Anxiety of the New Solution: The fear and uncertainty of making a change.

By unpacking these forces, businesses can align their solutions with consumer needs more effectively. At Minimalist Innovation LLC, we integrate this understanding into our Change Engineering approach to create strategies that enable customer progress for sustainable business growth. This is the foundation of Change Engineering, a practice that embeds adaptability and alignment into every solution we design.

This blog explores how businesses can stay in sync with their customers’ changing needs, ensuring they deliver value that evolves with the market.

“If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them. Instead give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.”

– Buckminster Fuller

Aligning your solutions with customer progress

Progress isn’t just about solving a problem; it’s about helping customers achieve their goals and aspirations. Whether it’s simplifying daily tasks, improving efficiency, or achieving long-term ambitions, progress is the driving force behind customer behavior. By identifying and addressing customer progress, businesses can create solutions that truly resonate.

Change Engineering is the practice of embedding adaptability and progress-focused thinking into business solutions. It moves beyond traditional change management by focusing not just on internal transitions but also on how products and services enable customer progress.

Change Engineering emphasizes designing tools and systems that naturally align with consumer behavior.

When I worked with a major coffee retail company, their finance team faced a critical challenge: their reporting processes weren’t aligned with the progress they needed to achieve. The team relied on a daily financial report generated at 4 AM to guide operations. This process was not only time-consuming but also lacked reliability, which eroded trust in the data and created inefficiencies in their decision-making process.

Through Change Engineering, we reframed the challenge to focus on the progress the team was striving for—timely, reliable insights that supported agile decision-making. By introducing real-time reporting, we enabled the team to access up-to-date financial data throughout the day, removing the dependency on the early morning report. This shift allowed the finance team to focus on what truly mattered: collaboration, planning, and adapting to changes in real time.

The results were transformative. The finance team no longer needed to wake up at 4 AM, instead holding planning sessions at a more practical time. Trust in the system grew, stress levels decreased, and decision-making processes became more dynamic and aligned with business needs. 

This is the essence of Change Engineering—solving operational inefficiencies while improving the human experience. By aligning technology with the true needs of the business and its people, we didn’t just fix a problem; we engineered progress.

Here are some tips to keep in touch with the customer progress:

  1. Leverage Data-Driven Insights:
    Use customer data to identify patterns, preferences, and unmet needs. AI and analytics tools can help uncover trends that signal evolving customer expectations.
  2. Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) Framework:
    Focus on the “job” your customer is trying to get done, not just the product they’re buying. By understanding their goals, you can design solutions that meet their real needs.
  3. Continuous Feedback Loops:
    Regularly engage with customers through surveys, interviews, or feedback platforms to stay updated on their challenges and aspirations.
  4. Appreciative Inquiry for Momentum:
    Focus on what’s working well and amplify those strengths to build momentum for continuous improvement and alignment.

“What gets measured gets managed.”

– Peter Drucker

Measuring the impact of progress driven solutions

1. Increased Customer Retention:
When solutions align with customer progress, loyalty grows. Businesses often see retention rates improve by 20-30%.

2. Higher Adoption Rates:
Products designed with progress in mind are more likely to be embraced, with adoption rates increasing by 15-25%.

3. Enhanced Customer Satisfaction Scores:
Solutions that address functional, emotional, and social progress lead to higher satisfaction levels, reflected in metrics like NPS.

4. Improved Market Share:
By staying aligned with customer progress, businesses can outperform competitors and capture a larger market share.

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Businesses can engineer change to evolve their services with customer needs, ensuring relevance and sustained success.

Ready to engineer change that drives progress? Visit our Beyond Digital Transformation offering to learn more.

The bigger picture of jobs

When using the Jobs-To-Be-Done (JTBD) framework to innovate, startups can unlock significant opportunities by understanding not just the core job customers are trying to accomplish but also the broader landscape of related and emotional jobs that surround it. This holistic approach helps avoid common pitfalls and creates pathways to scalable, impactful solutions.

A functional job represents the core task customers are trying to complete—such as verifying the authenticity of documents. But this job doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s part of a broader journey, often mapped through a job map, that includes related tasks and emotional outcomes.

“When you understand the full job map, you begin to see that what looks like a product feature might actually be the foundation of an entirely new business model.” – Anthony Ulwick, Founder of Strategyn

When related jobs are overlooked…

Consider a compliance officer who must verify documents (functional job). Their goal extends beyond accuracy—they want to feel assured in their compliance with regulations (emotional job) and ensure the verification process integrates smoothly with other workflows like Know Your Customer (KYC) or Anti-Money Laundering (AML) compliance (related jobs).

Startups often focus on excelling at the functional job, which is essential. However, failing to address related jobs can limit growth and leave untapped potential on the table. Let’s explore why related jobs matter and how startups can leverage them to achieve greater success.

For startups, focusing too narrowly on a single functional job can lead to several challenges:

  1. Market Size Limitations: Concentrating exclusively on one highly specialized use case may restrict the total addressable market (TAM), limiting the startup’s ability to scale.
  2. Constrained Resources: Building features for a narrow job often ties up valuable engineering resources, making it harder to expand or adapt to other markets.
  3. Missed Strategic Opportunities: Startups that overlook related jobs risk missing broader opportunities for vertical integration or partnerships, leaving value on the table.
  4. Innovation Bottlenecks: A lack of flexibility due to technical debt or hyper-specialized development can hinder the ability to pivot or respond to new market demands.

The JTBD framework reveals that related jobs can serve as stepping stones to broader innovation and market impact. Consider how addressing related jobs can unlock new possibilities:

  1. Expanding Market Reach: Understanding related jobs positions your product as part of a larger solution. For example, a tool that verifies documents can evolve into a key component of end-to-end KYC or AML workflows, appealing to larger customer bases.
  2. Strategic Partnerships: By aligning with related jobs, startups can collaborate with complementary platforms or solutions, creating mutually beneficial ecosystems that enhance value for end users.
  3. Stronger Customer Resonance: A product designed to integrate seamlessly into broader workflows resonates more strongly with customers solving complex challenges, leading to better retention and satisfaction.
  4. Enhanced Valuation Potential: Broadening the scope beyond a single functional job can improve the company’s perceived value by investors, demonstrating scalability and diverse market potential.

job-map

To visualize this, consider this universal job map template developed by Tony Ulwick.

A strategic job to unlock related jobs

Startups can uncover related jobs by asking critical questions:

  • What workflows or processes does your product connect to? Look at the customer’s end-to-end journey. How does your solution fit into their bigger picture?
  • What happens before and after your product is used?  Consider adjacent tasks that customers must complete before or after engaging with your product.
  • What larger goals are your customers pursuing? Think beyond the immediate task. How does solving the functional job contribute to a broader mission or outcome?

By addressing these questions, startups can create comprehensive job maps, revealing opportunities to innovate not just on the core job but across the entire workflow.

Use related jobs to integrate into a larger ecosystem of customer goals and workflows

Ready to uncover the related jobs driving growth for your startup? Visit our Beyond Digital Transformation offering to learn more.