7 Lessons Learned From 25 Years of New Product Introduction

Find your vanguard. Better yet, *be* your vanguard.

If your vanguard is a team, get specific. Identify people, not groups. Teams don't make decisions — people do.

Find an excruciating pain for at least one of those people. Not a "nice to have." Not a "want." A pain.

Define a platform mission that:

• Aligns with who your vanguard wants to become, and
• Directly intersects with that pain.

Deliver a specific solution for that pain while staying true to the platform mission.

Get 10 vanguard teams using your solution.

Care deeply about the person (or people) who feel the excruciating pain. Understand the rest of the team well enough to assuage, defuse, or win them over.

Sweat every detail. Obsess over the nuances of the pain and the solution until at least 4 out of 10 of those teams say:

"We couldn't live without you."

(And importantly: no adjacent team members should be saying "I can't live with this.")

Once you reach this point, ask yourself:

Is your solution just a point solution, or is it extensible?

• If it's just a point solution, you drifted away from the platform mission.
• If it's extensible, now you scale. And now you grow.