Seth Barrett is the kind of frontline leader that Lean Startup was made for. He’s been a VP at a DC-based startup, a product manager at Bloomberg, and was even a producer at AOL back in its heyday. He’s been on the small teams tasked with innovation and he’s been on the established product side of organizations that want to see sustained and steady growth.
“I’ve seen the tension at most of the companies where I’ve worked,” says Barrett, currently a consultant for a Fortune 500 insurer working on new digital products. “When you get aggressive and want to innovate, there’s always a risk for cannibalization from a commercialization standpoint, especially if the business is successful.”
The other management peril that Barrett has seen is when small teams are sequestered off on their own or a new department is spun off and tasked with innovating in a way that directly challenges the way the legacy organization has been running the business. Simply put, the idea of an internal startup doesn’t ring true for him. “The guys doing the revolutionary work aren’t tethered to reality. They are cooking up concepts that could be great, and they may address customer needs, but they may break down under the full weight of solving the customer’s problem.”
That tension has given him a new perspective on the methods of innovation, specifically Lean Startup, that he didn’t learn in business school.
“Lean Startup is a critical component of sustainability,” says Barrett. “People look at innovation as a threat to sustainability but in the long run it’s the opposite. A company that has been growing at 5 percent a year and doesn’t want to see a down fiscal year based on an innovative new product rollout still needs to find way to bring new ideas to market without upending their apple cart. Their long-term survival depends on it,” Barrett says.
Entrepreneurship is Not Just for Entrepreneurs
Providing the “evolutionaries” who are working on the frontlines of the established business with the tools of the “revolutionaries” who know how to cut new paths forward with innovative ideas and products resonates with Barrett.
“How Lean Startup plays into it for me is that you can run controlled experimentation in parts of the company and then the most useful and sustainable ideas that actually work will get more institutionalized into the core business. It’s that validated learning that gets all stakeholders on board with an idea because it’s been made real.”
In his own consulting work, Barrett often references the work of The New York Times to help make the connection for his clients and to illustrate Eric Ries’ principle that entrepreneurs are everywhere.
“Yes, they are this eminent and established publisher but think of how much product development they are able to test on a real audience. They can experiment with products in a different way than a service or product company. They can even solicit user-generated content and then they can embed it into their general offering.”
Break the Model or Bend It?
On the frontlines, Barrett recognizes that evolutionaries know how the product is used, they understand the customer, and they know the operational challenges that their teams face. Whereas the revolutionaries just see a model that they want to break.
“You have to be able to do both,” he says. “If you don’t do the revolutionary, someone will replace you. But really you have to do both in one aligned direction. You need to merge the innovation function into the operationalization of the legacy product.”
The two parties need a common language and that’s where a framework such as Lean Startup comes in, from Barrett’s perspective. “Both functions are important. They are mutually informing. They need to connect and iterate together. Without that shared learning from all parts of the organization there may be continued growth but it’s going to decelerate eventually.”
The True Gen 