037: Crossing the Chasm: How to Effectively Drive Innovation with Geoffrey Moore

Enterprise Product Leadership

My guest today is Geoffrey Moore; a speaker, advisor, and best-selling author of some of the most influential business books of the past decade — including the world-famous book, Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers.

It is no exaggeration to say that Geoffrey’s books have molded my product career throughout the years. From Crossing the Chasm to Inside the Tornado, Dealing with Darwin to Zone to Win — his deep insights into how the B2B market works have been a critical component of how I approach product strategy and innovation. This is just one of the reasons why I’m so excited to have Geoffrey on the show today.

In this episode, we discuss how an enterprise’s structure needs to adapt to drive innovation, how leaders should incorporate technology trends (such as AI, IoT, and 5G) into their product innovation roadmap, as well as the difficult topic of why so many B2B products die during the pilot stage.

This is a very insightful episode. I cannot wait for you all to tune in and learn just as much as I did from this conversation with Geoffrey Moore!

Episode Details: Crossing the Chasm: How to Effectively Drive Innovation with Geoffrey Moore:

“Crossing the chasm is the first move for taking your innovation away from just a technology focus to a customer focus.” — Geoffrey Moore

About Geoffrey Moore:

Geoffrey Moore is an author, speaker, and advisor who splits his consulting time between start-up companies in the Wildcat Venture Partners portfolios and established high-tech enterprises, most recently including Salesforce, Microsoft, Autodesk, F5Networks, Gainsight, Google, and Splunk.

Moore’s life’s work has focused on the market dynamics surrounding disruptive innovations. His first book, Crossing the Chasm, focuses on the challenges start-up companies face transitioning from early adopting to mainstream customers. It has sold more than a million copies, and its third edition has been revised such that the majority of its examples and case studies reference companies that have come to prominence from the past decade. Moore’s most recent work, Zone to Win, addresses the challenge large enterprises face when embracing disruptive innovations, even when it is in their best interests to do so. It’s time to stop explaining why they don’t and start explaining how they can. This has been the basis of much of his recent consulting.

Topics We Discuss in this Episode:

• About Geoffrey’s career background and the work he is currently doing today

• The four organizational zones that companies need to have in order to drive innovation (as outlined in his new book, Zone to Win)

• Why there is a massive need for organizations to innovate in an accelerated and repeatable way (and the ways that sometimes prevent them from doing so)

• How Geoffrey has helped companies get leadership to understand that there needs to be an investment in all four of these zones in order to successfully innovate

• The downsides of being reactive instead of proactive

• Key lessons in innovation

• The challenges you’ll face in the process of innovation and how to persevere through them

• How leaders should incorporate technology trends (such as AI, IoT, and 5G) into their product innovation roadmap

• Why Crossing the Chasm is the first step in taking innovation from a technology-focus to a customer-focus (and why this is KEY to propelling your business forward)

• What a “whole product” means and why it is important

• How to graduate past the early market

• The difference between horizontal products and vertical products

• Why you should start with the application dynamic before transitioning to the platform dynamic

• The key to a successful partnership

• The difference between a product vs. a solution

• Where a small company has an advantage over a big company

• Why so many B2B products die during the pilot stage and Geoffrey’s advice to product leaders

Product Leader Tip of the Week:

How to approach innovation in this era of high uncertainty:

Don’t try to solve it all with one tool. Start at the beginning with a set of technology-oriented tools that are designed to explore the technology and get familiar with the properties. Simply try and figure out if this new technology affects your customer’s industry and if it is really right for your company or not. Once you cross the chasm, you want to shift the framework from product to solution.

As a product leader, you really need to be thinking about where you are as a company and really consider which framework you should be using.

To Learn More About Geoffrey Moore:

• GeoffreyAMoore.com

• Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers, by Geoffrey A. Moore

• Zone to Win: Organizing to Compete in an Age of Disruption, by Geoffrey A. Moore

• Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution, by Geoffrey A. Moore

• Inside the Tornado: Strategies for Developing, Leveraging, and Surviving Hypergrowth Markets, by Geoffrey A. Moore

Related Resources:

• DanielElizalde.com/Template — Download Daniel’s free IoT Product Strategy Template here!

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