I have led transformations where in one instance, my team took on an ambitious and what felt like an impossible challenge, which was to create a brand new complex product from scratch in only 5-weeks. This wasn’t a start-up. This was a large multinational with a presence in 42 countries with a brand image to protect. We were more worried about the damage this product might do to the brand than how much revenue it would generate. And it wasn’t a simple product. It was a multi-tier application in a hybrid cloud with many moving parts, multiple teams involved and lots of dependences.
Expectations were high and the task was clear. Create a high quality product in a large complex organisation with a non-negotiable deadline. Deadline could not move because external commitments have already been made. Does that sound familiar?
So what did we do? As a team, we worked incredibly hard. But working harder wasn’t going to be enough. We had to work smarter. We had to change our ways of working. We had to experiment. Try things we hadn’t tried before. The key was clarity of what we needed to achieve, laser sharp focus on the outcome and filtering out all the distractions.
What was the result? We put the product live at 7:15pm on 31 March ahead of the planned launch on 1st April with first sale on that day. That’s from a concept on a piece of paper to a fully functional product in the hands of the users generating revenue, in 5 weeks. This was unheard of in our organisation at the time. This was our first successful product launch as part of our digital transformation. This launch gave the whole initiative a massive boost and generated momentum that carried us forward.
In summary, you can achieve the seemingly impossible with clarity on the goal and laser sharp focus on the outcome.