In the good old days, new product development was so manageable with Scrum. We ambled along with 30-day sprints, a single product owner, a neat product backlog, and a collocated Scrum team. Today’s business environment is a tsunami of global hypercompetition. Companies enter and are forced off the S&P 500 every 15 years. The classic Innovators Dilemma has become more pressing. Disruptive innovation requires us to gather and filter ideas, creatively experiment with them, sell them internally, and ultimately capture their economic value. In the 21st century, we need to surf business turbulence by creating innovative new products and services. Simultaneously, we need to operate existing products and services and trade out non-performing ones for sustained business value. Learn the five essential steps to surf this “fuzzy front-end” of innovation, including innovation pipeline management, Agile budgeting and incremental funding, high-performance standing teams, product discovery and lean experimentation, and high-performance Agile engineering.
