My new book “Innovation Journey: from idea to early customers” is coming out this Fall! The book is a practical guide for leading enterprise software from idea to your first ten pilot customers.
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What is the book about?
Companies need to constantly innovate to survive in this fast-changing world. But instead of delivering rapid and consistent progress, most companies waste a lot of time and money placing big bets hoping to take new products directly from idea to scale. These companies fail because they skip a critical element of launching new products: having a deep understanding of their enterprise customers.
This book is a practical guide, including a step-by-step method to understand your enterprise customers so you can build the right product for the right people in the right market. Instead of going from idea to scale, the book focuses on the six distinct stages required to go from idea to your first ten pilot customers. These stages are:
- Stage 1 – Agree on the customer’s business outcome to explore
- Stage 2 – Select a target market and understand your customer’s pain
- Stage 3 – Understand your user ecosystem
- Stage 4 – Plan your solution
- Stage 5 – Iterate testing and building your solution
- Stage 6 – Deliver value to your first ten pilot customers
I use the term “enterprise software” to cover a large umbrella of applications and industries. By enterprise software, I don’t mean only “business software.” Instead, I mean any software that solves the pains of a company (B2B). Therefore, throughout the book, you’ll find examples from a wide variety of industries and applications, including business software, eCommerce platforms, Industrial solutions, Logistics software, FinTech solutions, Climate Tech solutions, as well as solutions that combine software and hardware (Industrial IoT). The point is that if you are building any type of B2B software product, then this book is for you.
Who is this book for?
This book is for people responsible for bringing new enterprise software products to market. Your role could be as a Product, Design, or Technology Leader, as well as Founder or any other leader at your company. Regardless of your title, or company size, if you are responsible for bringing B2B software products to market, then this book is for you. This book is also for you if you aspire to an innovation or Product Leadership role since you’ll get an insider look at what it takes to lead innovation for B2B products.
In summary, this book is also for you if:
- You are responsible for new enterprise software products, regardless of whether you work at a startup or a large corporation.
- Your customer is another company (B2B).
- You are looking for a structured approach to leading enterprise software products.
- You are looking for tools that work in a B2B context to understand your customer needs and iterate towards building the right solution.
- You struggle to get buy-in on your vision from your executive team and other stakeholders.
- You aspire to a career in Product Leadership, and you are looking to understand what it takes to lead the innovation journey for enterprise software products.
About Daniel Elizalde (or why I’m a relevant source of advice)
This book builds on over 20 years of my professional experience managing the lifecycle of complex Enterprise and Industrial products in many industries, including Renewable Energy, eCommerce, Manufacturing, Telecommunications, and Automotive.
This experience is not only through reading books or giving talks (which I’ve done many). My experience is from actually doing the work. This work includes several leadership positions, such as VP, Head of IoT at Ericsson, Head of Products at Stem (a GE-backed energy storage startup in Silicon Valley), and Product Leadership coach helping organizations drive enterprise software from idea to commercialization.
You can be confident that every concept in this book has been tested in the field and has helped startups and large corporations advance their innovation journey. In fact, as part of my coaching practice and my classes at Stanford University, I’ve trained over 1,500 product professionals to drive enterprise software and Industrial IoT products.
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