To shift a services-oriented company to a product mindset, frame productization as a competitive advantage. Repeatable, productized solutions offer greater market differentiation than purely custom builds, leading to more effective competition and new deal wins. This tangible benefit helps secure buy-in from sales and leadership.

A powerful innovation technique is "humanization": benchmarking your product against the ideal human experience, not a competitor's feature set. This raises the bar for excellence and surfaces opportunities for deep delight, like Google Meet's hand-raise feature mimicking in-person meetings.

To ensure its new payments platform was truly scalable, Irembo hired a new product manager. Existing PMs were too biased by the primary government product's needs. The new PM could treat the main product as just one client, enforcing standards and preventing over-customization.

Most startups focus on product or technology innovation, but Gamma's CEO argues that innovating on organizational design is an equally powerful lever. This means rethinking hiring, management, and team composition to create a competitive advantage.

In a multi-product company, horizontal teams naturally prioritize mature, high-impact businesses. Structuring teams vertically with P&L ownership for each product, even nascent ones, ensures dedicated focus and accountability, preventing smaller initiatives from being starved of resources.

IBM uses a visual artifact called the "Golden Thread"—a living document showing product vision, value, and a feedback loop. This low-cost tool aligns diverse stakeholders, from the boardroom to developers, around outcomes instead of features, thereby de-risking innovation.

Afeyan advises against making breakthrough innovation everyone's responsibility, as it's unsustainable and disruptive to daily jobs. Instead, companies should create a separate group with different motivations, composition, and rewards, focused solely on discontinuous leaps.

Forcing innovations to "scale" via top-down mandates often fails by robbing local teams of ownership. A better approach is to let good ideas "spread." If a solution is truly valuable, other teams will naturally adopt it. This pull-based model ensures change sticks and evolves.

To launch new products and compete with agile startups, embed a small "incubation seller" team directly within the technology organization. This model ensures tight alignment between product, engineering, and the first revenue-generating efforts, mirroring the cross-functional approach of an early-stage company.