Turning singles into doubles, triples, home runs and grand slams

Once your team builds something new, now you have an asset.

And the key to making that asset the most useful to the company is to think about it in terms of its leverage.

In my experience launching hundreds of products and projects over the years, both independently as an entrepreneur, and also with teams as an employee, the key to leverage is asking the right questions.

Giving yourself and others creative constraints within which to find useful ideas. Remember, changing the frame alters the way you see the picture. And if you’re willing to pursue innovation systematically rather than sporadically, it’s amazing what you and your team can come up with.

Years ago, our startup launched an online calculator to help our clients, most of whom are business development executives at franchise brands, make more data driven sales and marketing budgetary decisions.

It’s a product a few of us built in a matter of weeks, with minimal upfront investment, that had the potential to create huge value for our current and future clients alike.

But once we shipped the beta version of the tool, made adjustments based on user feedback, we reached the crossroads almost every product manager has experienced before.

Now we had to figure out how to leverage the damn thing.

Have you ever found yourself at that crossroads before?

It’s one of those common inflection points that causes many projects, initiatives and projects to die on the vine. The reason is, many of us are encouraged to stop after our first success. We pat ourselves on the back for our nice little victory, and then we move on too quickly and leave a lot of leverage on the table.

I’ve been guilty of making this mistake too many times in my career. Not taking things far enough to realize their full potential.

Maybe because I’m more of a process guy than a results guy. I get the most fulfillment from building the boat, not sailing in it.

But lately I’ve been working on carrying my executions even further than before. Trying to turn my singles into double, triples, home runs and grand slams.

It’s quite the exhilarating process, and if you have a solid framework and a sharp team, it’s not as difficult as it sounds.

Which brings us back to our startup’s online tool. Wanting to assure we maximized our leverage, here’s what happened.

We called a meeting with a broad pool of team members from company departments. The goal was to figure out how our new online calculator would be most useful to the different parts of our company. And in our memo about the session, here are the leverage questions that our team leader asked people to think about.

How can you personally use this tool as it exists today?
What stands in the way of you using it?
How would you like to be able to use this online calculator in the future?
What limited changes would be needed to make that a reality?

This framework was incredibly valuable to our team. Once we all got together, everybody had at least one duh idea.

If you’re not familiar with this concept, it’s when somebody outside of the core team makes a suggestion that seems obvious to them, but never occurred to the people initially built the product. They were simply too close to it, and needed fresh eyes.

Anyway, by the end of the meeting, we had a whiteboard full of potential optimizations to make our product more valuable. We prioritized them according to our usual execution framework, which is energy level, resources and market need.

And we had our marching orders to begin development on the next iteration.

If you want to get more leverage out of the new assets you now have, it all starts with asking the right questions. Changing the frame so you can alter the way you see the picture.

Because you can only innovate by the seat of your pants for so long. Eventually, you’re going to have to pursue the creative process systematically, not just sporadically.

How will you give yourself and others creative constraints within which to find useful ideas?