Sunday Rewind: An explorer's mindset by Tendayi Viki

This week’s Sunday Rewind is a ProductTank Cardiff talk from Tendayi Viki, a partner at Strategyzer, which draws on ideas from his book, Pirates in the Navy, to offer advice for product leaders on coaching their teams for success.

Tendayi encourages us to reframe teams focused on innovation, and to think about them as privateers rather than pirates. He says successful privateers were often explorers, sanctioned by the state to discover new lands and resources.

The differences between explore and exploit mindsets are, he says:

1. Focus  and objectives
2. Degrees of operational uncertainty
3. Financial and resource philosophy
4. Culture and processes
5. Key people and skills

Understanding these distinctions, and being able to model and balance them, is what leads to powerful innovation in larger organisations.

A common challenge for larger organisations is that ideas are very hard to remove from the product portfolio. Tendayi says that you should always anticipate having to kill off some ideas. In Product, there is sometimes a cultural assumption that we can start an idea, and then pivot our way to success. A willingness to pivot is crucial, but it is equally important to be willing to discard an idea that shows no signs of success.

Gauging a team’s success is dependent on the right resources and asking the right questions. A useful framework for this is to scale your questions along with your investments, says Tendayi, while recognising that this is not a linear process.

A leader’s role is to coach teams to develop the explorer’s mindset, says Tendayi, and so create conditions in which winning ideas can emerge. Make small bets, empower your teams to go out into the world to discover what works, and then to invest in the ideas with low innovation risk, and a high confidence of good returns.