Tech Business Products

[Octavia Leithoff]

Ihave already written about some of the causes of this. The case I see quite frequently is after the founding CEO leaves. However, I am not the first person to observe and write about the lack of innovation at larger companies. In particular, there are two people that I think have contributed in meaningful ways to this discussion.

The first person is Ben Horowitz. Ben uses the analogy of war time vs. peace time. We focus on scale and execution during times of peace, but once we encounter serious threats to our business from changing technology, evolving markets, and emerging competitors, this requires a war time mindset and a relentless focus on continuous innovation. I have witnessed many established companies that are clearly in war time but continue to behave as if in peace time.

It took me several years before I had strong opinions about the way they built software, but I quickly saw the behaviors and especially the consequences. But that difference, while significant, seemed a poor excuse for the way in which they built software.

In any case, the Internet happened. Now there were literally thousands of organizations that were newly tasked with building solutions not just for their co-workers, but also for their customers. The issues that were irritations for enterprises, all of the sudden became business continuity issues.

2) Passion. In an IT mindset organization, product and tech are mercenaries. There is little to no product passion. They are there to build whatever. In a product organization, product and tech are missionaries. They have joined the organization because they care about the mission and helping customers solve real problems.

4) Staffing. The IT mindset shows up very visibly in the staff and the roles. The lack of true product managers (especially strong product managers), the lack of true interaction designers, the prevalence of old-style project management, engineers unfamiliar with the demands of scale and performance, the existence of old-style business analysts, and heavy use of outsourcing, are all clear examples of this. I would argue the most telling manifestation of the IT mindset problem is that the product managers in IT mindset companies are typically very weak, and at true product companies they are necessarily very strong (see -product-manager-contribution/).

6) Process. In IT mindset companies, you usually find very slow, heavy, Waterfall processes, even when the engineers consider themselves Agile. The only part that would be considered Agile would be at the tail end of build, test and release. Much of this stems from the Funding issue above, but deciding what areas to invest in, staffing a team, defining and designing the solution, and release planning are all typically very Waterfall. Technology-enabled product organizations simply must move much faster, and work differently, in order to deliver the necessary solutions for our customers and our business.

7) Silos. In IT mindset companies, people align by function, creating silos between the different areas of the business, product, user experience design, engineering, QA and site operations. In contrast, in a product organization, we depend on true collaboration between product, user experience design, technology and the business units. In a product organization we optimize for product teams, not for the individual functions.

Nobody should believe that true innovation is only possible in startups. Companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix are great examples of large commercial product companies that have proven their ability to consistently innovate.

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We set out to understand the best practices of top-performing product management organizations, how top product managers operate day to day, and how they help companies grow. Based on our extensive research, work with more than 50 product management organizations, and conversations with world-class product experts, we have identified seven key practices that can help organizations elevate their product management capabilities to maximize their software investment.2All product management experts quoted in this article shared their stories at a publicly available, eight-part virtual speaker series held between May and August 2022 as part of the McKinsey Product Academy Fundamentals program. The series featured eight world-class product experts from leading organizations.

Developing hypotheses about customer behavior and then fully testing their validity is a critical precursor to feature development. Testing is core to iterative development practices, as it enables product managers to iteratively refine product and feature ideas without requiring additional development resources. Testing can take many forms, such as customer interviews, targeted emails, low-fidelity mock-ups, or even no-code prototypes, but the key is to validate the hypothesis before committing significant resources to development. Product managers with deep domain knowledge can fall into the trap of assuming the value of a product or feature and may skip the critical testing step.

For product leaders, establishing a baseline of product management capabilities is typically followed by two parallel paths: strengthening key enablers and investing in a broad capability-building program for current talent. For the latter, an immersive training program, where product managers can simulate a real-world customer problem and take a product from idea to execution while receiving regular coaching, can deliver dramatic improvement in product management outcomes.

As the pace of technology development increases and software continues to play an increasing role in every facet of life, developing a best-in-class product management function becomes ever more important. Strengthening product management capabilities allows companies to unlock the full potential of their software development talent, fully maximize the return on their software investment, and ultimately elevate their business outcomes.

AstraZeneca today launches Evinova, set to be a leading provider of digital health solutions to better meet the needs of healthcare professionals, regulators and patients. With long-term backing from AstraZeneca and strategic collaborations with Parexel and Fortrea, Evinova offers globally-scaled digital products and services to the life sciences and healthcare sector.

Evinova will prioritise bringing to market established and scaled digital technology solutions already being used globally by AstraZeneca to optimise clinical trial design and delivery. This will reduce the time and cost of developing new medicines, bring care closer to home for patients and reduce the burden on health systems. Evinova will also pursue opportunities in digital remote patient monitoring and digital therapeutics with a pipeline of digital innovations in these areas.

Globally-leading CROs Parexel and Fortrea have entered into agreements to offer Evinova digital health solutions to their wide customer base. To accelerate industry adoption and sustain and expand the global reach of its digital products, Evinova is collaborating with Accenture and Amazon Web Services.

Evinova will combine clinical and regulatory experience gained at AstraZeneca with its deep expertise in digital technology spanning strategy and development, digital product development, data science and AI, user experience design and behavioural science. In addition to digital solutions, Evinova will offer custom scientific solutions, including remote patient monitoring and novel endpoint solutions, as well as trial design and consulting services.

Evinova portfolio management: Supports clinical programme and trial management, reporting and governance through transparent real-time insights and predictive analytics. It provides a complete picture of the portfolio across all phases and allows for tracking of clinical programmes and trials at global, regional, country and site level. It uses predictive algorithms to provide future key milestones, enabling study leaders to understand deviations from plans and supporting appropriate intervention.

Digital health technology and clinical research

A significant part of the cost and time of the drug development process is in the clinical trials, rather than designing molecules. However, they are vital to the drug development and approval process and critical in enabling access to innovative medicines. Studies estimate that it now costs up to $2bn to bring a new drug to market4 and according to one study the average length of time from the start of clinical testing to approval is 7.1 years.5 Across the industry, almost 80% of clinical trials fail to meet recruiting timelines6 and only 3-5% of eligible cancer patients join a clinical trial.7 Many groups, including marginalised racial and ethnic groups, women, and other populations are underrepresented in clinical trials.8

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