For anyone who likes a great story about strategic achievement, the tale behind Motorola’s Razr phone has a lot of excitement: single-minded focus on one goal, a small team of passionate innovators, timely high-level intervention, clandestine development and a product that an industry thought was impossible. It even has a great ending: sales that exceeded total lifetime projections in three months, one million units of the US$450 phone sold within six months and an iconic product that revitalized Motorola’s image.
This yarn unfolds in an insightful article in a recent Harvard Business School Newsletter describing Motorola’s strategy for producing the Razr. The article also provides a great example of how reinventing the strategic process is critical for achieving success. While not as sexy as the topics described above, managing the process intelligently is important in any strategic development, and critical when developing an Internet strategy.
Scott Anthony, the article’s author, notes that Motorola’s new product development process allowed representatives from the major sales regions to assess the concept and then develop a forecast which helped Motorola decide whether to invest in that phone. “It was a complicated dance,” writes Anthony. “If a development team ignored features that a specific region deemed critical, that region would project low sales for the phone. The lowered forecast would make it tougher to get approval to move the project forward. Design teams knew they had to appease each region or their projects would die on the vine.
“Obviously, this system has pluses and minuses. On the one hand, it ensures that products reflect some critical in-market feedback provided by the regions. But, it can force designers to develop compromised products that end up being acceptable to everyone yet delightful to no one. More distressing still, the process can systematically stamp out highly differentiated, counterintuitive innovations such as the Razr.”
Early on, the Razr development team realized that the usual process would prevent it from maintaining a singled minded focus on one goal, which was simplicity. While they respected the rules of the game that governed product development, they knew the system wouldn’t work for them. So they invented new rules, positioning the product as one that didn’t need to produce high revenue.
“We kept on playing the icon card,” explains Roger Jellicoe, a director of operations who managed the Razr development project. “This product was represented as this iconic, image-leading, low-sales-volume program. I think the Razr got by all the internal processes because it was characterized from the outset as an exception.”
A web site isn’t a product, but the Razr story offers some important lessons for developing an effective Internet strategy. First of all, successful Internet strategies require a small, committed team and visionary high-level support. They also call for the correct process. Frequently, organizations fall into one of two traps when developing an Internet strategy. The first trap is insisting that the Web team adhere closely to established processes for project development, which may impose creativity-destroying requirements on the site. The second trap is assuming that because the Web isn’t a product, it doesn’t need a process, which results in no connection to business goals and no measurable objectives for the site.
Avoiding these traps requires a process that enables the complicated dance described in the Motorola case. To be effective, an Internet strategy must include the perspectives of all stakeholders and users, link to organizational goals, incorporate best in class lessons from other Internet sites but still allow the Web team to innovate, which often means challenging long-held assumptions within their organization. For this reason, Prescient’s approach to strategic planning emphasizes process. The methodology is a collection of tools and techniques that enable each project to benefit from previous experience, successes, and leading best practices. Key advantages of our methodology include consistent terminology across projects, streamlined and repeatable processes, and most importantly, predictable results.
Of course, we love a great story about strategic achievement, and hope that if you have one you’ll share it. We like yarns in which they said it can’t be done, by the way.
