6 ways to continuously improve your products, according to business leaders

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Getting a new product out the door is just the beginning. Companies that want long-term success must refine their services in response to new business and customer requirements.

So, how can your organization ensure it delivers continuous improvements to its products and services? Six business leaders share their top tips.

1. Show people how far they've come

Tomer Cohen, chief product officer at LinkedIn, said two elements are key to delivering continuous improvements in products and services.

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First, teams must deliver incremental enhancements that lead to better products: "Those small changes compound and build up daily."

Second, and most crucially, leaders must set a long-term vision that team members buy into. "I believe you have to start backwards from that point," Cohen told ZDNET. "Paint a vision, like, 'That's the peak of the mountains we're trying to climb, and I'm only going to show you the base camp. And we'll go together to the base camp.'"

Then, after reaching base camp, business leaders and their teams should plan for the next stage with one eye on the top of the mountain.

"With that approach, your team is locked set on what you're trying to achieve ultimately -- there's a shared vision," he said. "They understand the value of their work. They're not only focusing on incremental changes that can feel mundane and boring. They can see where you're headed."

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Cohen said it's important to look back and show the team how far they've come, while always improving the products and services delivered.

"If you do continuous improvements without a vision, then it can feel like you're just moving along and not exactly sure you're targeting the right place," he said.

"But if you focus on the vision, without continuous improvement, there's no way you'll achieve your objectives. If you can do both together, it's like a guaranteed formula for success."

2. Detect pockets of busyness

Markus Schümmelfeder, global CIO at biopharmaceutical giant Boehringer Ingelheim, said it's important to be honest about how your organization allocates its resources.

"We see a lot of busyness in IT," he said. "You have to identify the priority areas for work. We're shifting to an adaptive organization to focus on the right things."

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Schümmelfeder told ZDNET that detecting "pockets of busyness" is crucial to ensuring people concentrate on improving products and services.

"Take these people and move them to the topics where they deliver more value than in the other areas," he said, before suggesting that's not necessarily a straightforward task.

"Many organizations have a box, and then you allocate resources, meaning people and money, and then they discuss aims with the business partners and start implementing. Then you hardly look at the work until they say, 'The project is done,'" he said. "This approach isn't good enough anymore. We want to shift the resources to the burning questions rather than unimportant processes."

3. Learn how to say no

Schümmelfeder's colleague, Oliver Sluke, head of IT for research, development, and medicine at Boehringer Ingelheim, said prioritizing specific products and services means learning to say no to other ideas.

"We've come from a world where all good ideas got attention and resources. Then my energy is distributed -- 5% on this project, 5% on this, 10% on this, and more," he said.

"What works much better is to say, 'Yes, we do the brainstorming,' where we all come up with good ideas, but then we say, 'What are the top two or three that we want to bring forward?'"

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That kind of focus means learning to say no to others: "You have to actively tell people, while it could be a good idea, other ideas are better."

Sluke told ZDNET that business leaders must tread carefully when taking this approach.

"It requires a lot of change management to tell people your idea is not a priority right now," he said. "But it's an approach that creates a better use of my time -- everyone gets some attention and is treated equally."

4. Train people to boost adoption

Joe Depa, EY's global chief innovation officer, said learning and development are critical to product and service adoption and future success.

"I've never heard a client tell me they've over-invested in training," he said. "Almost every client would tell you I did this rollout of technology, and the one mistake I made is that I didn't invest enough in training our practitioners on how to use it."

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Depa told ZDNET that the focus on learning and development will continue to be a critical success factor.

"Any time you're developing or implementing new technologies, you've got to make sure you're putting aside money and resources to help train employees who will be the most impacted," he said. 

"Often, you need to train people before the solution is deployed, because they may have good feedback on that process that could help you improve how the technology is rolled out, so you could drive better adoption."

5. Speak with customers regularly

Tim Chilton, managing consultant at mapping service Ordnance Survey, said continuous improvement relies on a well-established customer interaction model.

"We spend lots of time directly interacting with our customers, helping them use our data," he said.

"They tell us what they think, and they tell us a little and often, so we don't get a big shock once a year. We are working with these people on a weekly, day-to-day basis. That allows us to fine-tune our product roadmaps regularly."

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Chilton told ZDNET that his organization completed a big product release in March. However, his team also completes many smaller releases as new features are added incrementally.

"My advice, particularly in the data product area, is to go with the core value you're focused on and to grow from there. Don't go big and think a product will answer everybody's questions. It never does," he said.

"In some of my previous roles, particularly at BT, where I was a product manager, the focus was the same -- what's the minimum viable product to get some market traction? Then talk to your customers and ask, 'What do you want?' And it normally isn't what you thought they wanted."

6. Always look to do more

Cindy Stoddard, Adobe CIO, said continuous improvement involves challenging the status quo, even when there isn't room to do much more.

"If you're at 99.9%, keep looking at how to improve that figure, because you can always do better than you are today," she said.

Stoddard told ZDNET that Adobe focuses firmly on continuous improvement in service management because her team delivers products to internal and external customers.

"We continually look at root-cause analysis," she said. "We continually look at doing post-mortems when things don't work out as expected. We look at how we can make things more resilient."

Stoddard said the result is an approach that always looks for enhancements: "It's about continually looking at the status quo and saying, 'How can I do it better?'"

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