Shared Progress Bets (SPBs) are an important concept in Enterprise Agility that helps companies make prudent decisions and investments to prepare for the future. SPBs are essentially strategic bets that aim to create progress towards shared goals between the company, customers, and employees.
When working with products, SPBs can be used to identify new opportunities and make investments that will generate future value. Here are some ways SPBs can be utilized for products:
- Exploring Adjacent Markets: Product teams can use SPBs to explore potential adjacent markets or product areas that may be promising under a 3 year timeframe. This involves researching trends, customer needs, and market dynamics to identify opportunities. Small pilots or prototypes can be built to validate assumptions.
- Platform Investments: SPBs can be used to make focused investments in platforms or infrastructure that will enable future product capabilities. For example, investing in a new cloud architecture, AI/ML platform, or IoT backbone to support future products.
- Partnership Bets: Forming strategic partnerships with other companies through SPBs can open up new product opportunities. Joint investments, licensing deals, or integrated offerings can be explored.
- New Business Model Bets: SPBs can be used to experiment with new business models such as subscriptions, usage based pricing, or bundling. Prototyping new models with a subset of customers can validate assumptions.
- Adjacent Capability Bets: SPBs can make investments in adjacent capabilities like moving into services, training, or consultative offerings to complement products. This expands value offered.
- Future Acquisition Bets: SPBs can be used to start relationship building and evaluation of potential acquisition targets that would expand the product portfolio. Criteria is identified and assessed.
The key is to take a portfolio approach, balancing SPBs with more incremental product investments. SPB investments should be smaller and timeboxed, serving as learning opportunities. By taking prudent risks and validating assumptions, SPBs can open up breakthrough growth opportunities under a 3-year horizon. Adjustments can be made quickly based on real data.
As you can see, Shared Progress Bets allow product teams to look beyond short-term roadmaps and quarterly results. By exploring uncertain but high-potential opportunities, SPBs create possibilities for transformative growth and progress in harmony with customer and workforce needs. But they must be rooted in the company's overall vision and strategy. Learn more about SPB in Chapter 9, Enterprise Agility Fundamentals.