Ideas Are Everywhere, Execution Lives in Culture

If you spend enough time in product organisations, a strange belief appears again and again: that ideas are scarce, precious things, and that innovation begins with the moment someone thinks up something clever. The reality is the opposite. Ideas are abundant. In fact, they’re the cheapest resource any business has.

At Stanford’s Decision Quality programme, they make the point very directly. If a company of just a few hundred people simply invited every employee to submit three ideas for new products or improvements, the organisation would receive more viable concepts in a single week than it could meaningfully execute in twenty years. The bottleneck is never the idea; it is the system around it.

When I took over the product function at a previous employer, we decided to put this principle into practice. We created a simple process that allowed anyone in the company to submit a new product request, regardless of role or seniority. Engineers, support staff, finance analysts, administrators, and salespeople all contributed. The product team reviewed every submission and provided direct feedback to the person who sent it. Sometimes we progressed an idea. Sometimes we didn’t, and when we couldn’t, we explained why. What mattered was that the door was always open and there was always a response.

What we learnt was illuminating. The vast majority of submissions came from sales, which wasn’t surprising; they were closest to customer conversations. But the most insightful contributions, the ones that eventually shaped products, pricing, or architecture, very often came from engineering. And perhaps the most important discovery was this: when the culture is healthy, people behave responsibly. They don’t flood the system with ridiculous proposals. They don’t game the process. They engage with it seriously because they see that it works seriously.

Contrast that with the typical “innovation theatre” that many organisations run: Dragons’ Den pitch sessions, idea competitions, hackathons dressed up as strategy. These rituals accidentally send the message that innovation is performance, that ideation is the real work, and that a single team or panel has the authority, or worse, the genius, to decide what matters. They also quietly tell the product team that its expertise is replaceable, and its contribution is trivial. No one would dream of telling the finance director that a group of untrained volunteers could run the books better, yet the same logic is applied freely to product.

Innovation does not come from ceremonies. It comes from culture, from the everyday willingness of people across the business to surface problems, imagine alternatives, and trust that their thinking will be met with respect rather than theatre. A business that builds this kind of culture never suffers from a shortage of ideas. It only ever suffers from a shortage of capacity, and that is a very different problem, and a far more solvable one.

Business Is Emotional: Decision-Making Under Uncertainty

There is a persistent myth in business that decisions are rational. We talk about data-driven strategy, objective evaluation, financial modelling, risk-adjusted returns. These tools matter, and they improve judgement, but they do not change the underlying truth: most, if not all, business decisions are emotional at the point of commitment. They have to be, because no one ever has all the information they need to make a purely logical choice.

You can see this even in trivial situations. If you step into a corner shop and compare two bottles of milk, you do not stop to calculate the supply chain, the relative freshness, the exact price per millilitre, or the probability that one brand will last longer. You choose quickly because the effort required to be “rational” vastly outweighs the value of precision. Now scale that to a £250,000 advertising contract with incomplete performance data, competitive pressure to act before Black Friday, and a looming internal deadline. No executive will wait for total certainty because the opportunity would vanish long before the information arrived. So, the decision is made when it “feels right enough,” not when it is complete.

This emotional gap-filling becomes even more visible when outcomes are unpredictable. Senior leaders live in a world of imperfect context, ambiguous signals, shifting incentives, and pressure to decide early. When the information landscape is incomplete, emotion fills the vacuum: fear of delay, fear of loss, fear of criticism, fear of being wrong alone, or the desire to protect the team, protect momentum, reassure stakeholders, or “beat the other guy.”

This emotional component is not a flaw or a disadvantage. It is a structural reality of how humans operate under uncertainty. What turns it into a problem is what happens afterwards, when organisations punish people for outcomes instead of evaluating the quality of the decisions themselves.

The Stanford Decisions Group (SDG, now Strategic Decisions Group, but Stanford at the time of my interactions with them) used a simple example: someone has a few drinks at a pub on a Friday night and then drives home safely. The outcome was positive. The decision was terrible. Yet in business, leaders invert this. They judge decisions by the outcome rather than the process. By that rationale driving home after a few at the pub is the right decision. When a poorly considered decision happens to work, the behaviour is reinforced. When a well-considered decision fails due to unforeseeable external factors, the person is reprimanded or has some other artificial consequences imposed. And in that moment, the organisation teaches everyone to avoid ownership, avoid risk, and avoid visibility.

This is learned helplessness at scale. When people know that a bad outcome leads to blame, they hesitate. They escalate late. They hide uncertainty. They become politically cautious rather than commercially courageous. And the organisation slows down, not because its people are weak, but because its environment is unsafe.

The opposite is emotional safety: the cultural condition where people can make timely decisions, surface risks early, share bad news while it still matters, and act before problems become irreversible. Emotional safety is not kindness, it’s calm normality. It is operational strength. It enables better judgement because it removes the emotional noise that distorts thinking.

 To coin a pithy phrase, “A business moves at the speed of the truth”. More precisely a business that engages with reality instead of fears and anticipations moves faster and encounters less resistance. And people are more likely to tell the truth, especially the uncomfortable truth, when they feel safe enough to do it.

Strategy Requires Focus, Fit, and Context, not “Right Answers”

In business, people instinctively reach for the idea that there must be a “right” product, a “right” strategy, or a “right” way to build something. It’s comforting, because if there is a right answer, then the job is to find it and follow it. But that thinking is both unrealistic and culturally corrosive. In complex environments, “right” is a mirage. Context is what matters.

The problem with believing in a right way is that it forces you to believe in a wrong way. And once you introduce the concept of wrongness into product and strategy, you create fear. Product teams stop experimenting. Engineers become defensive. Salespeople soften bad news to avoid looking incompetent. Leaders hesitate to question assumptions because doing so sounds like criticism. The concept of “right” doesn’t create clarity; it creates anxiety. People stop trying to do what works and start trying to avoid being wrong.

When you remove the notion of the “right product,” something liberating happens. You can look honestly at what your organisation can actually support, sustain, and scale. You can design for your capabilities rather than for an idealised version of another company’s strengths. You can accept that every product involves compromise, and that those compromises aren’t moral failings, they’re simply acknowledgements of reality. Culture, history, economics, architecture, people, partnerships, legacy constraints, risk appetite, and even timing all shape what is viable. Strategy emerges from these conditions. It is not deduced from a textbook.

This is why competitors should never be treated as role models. Their capabilities are not your capabilities. Their cost base, partnerships, history, internal incentives, and customer mix are entirely different. A competitor’s success tells you something about the market, but it does not tell you what you should do. In fact, copying a competitor is often an emotional reaction, an attempt to reduce uncertainty by leaning on the illusion that “they must be doing it right.” But competitors are usually succeeding for their reasons, not because they have discovered universal truths.

Some competitors win because they landed early in an immature market. Some are propped up by internal group demand. Some are quietly unprofitable and masking it with growth. Some succeed because a better product simply hasn’t been introduced yet. Some operate with shortcuts you cannot take. Some have cultural traits that allow certain strategies to work that would never survive in your environment. Their success is contextual, not prescriptive.

Once you abandon the belief in “right answers,” you can pay attention to fit. Fit is the relationship between what the market wants, what your organisation can deliver, and what your teams can operate reliably at scale. A product with perfect fit, or even one with good fit, will outperform a product with perfect features. A strategy that fits your capabilities will outperform the one that looks good on a slide. Long-term advantage belongs to the business that continually adjusts itself to what is real, not to the one that tries to replicate an imaginary ideal.

Strategy is not the discovery of truth. It is the creation of coherence, the alignment between what is possible, what is valuable, and what is sustainable for you. When you build from fit instead of from ideal, decisions become simpler, organisations become calmer, and execution becomes far more reliable.

Products Succeed When They Reduce Friction Across the Whole System

When people talk about why products succeed, they tend to focus on surface qualities: features, performance, differentiation, innovation, price. These matter, but none of them reliably determine success. In practice, the products that win are the ones that create the least friction, not just for customers, but for every part of the organisation that has to live with them.

Friction is the hidden cost that accumulates when a product is difficult to understand, difficult to sell, difficult to provision, difficult to support, or difficult to bill. Customers feel it as ambiguity or effort. Sales teams feel it as hesitation. Operations feel it as bottlenecks. Engineering feels it as unnecessary load. Finance feels it as leakage or confusion. Each group experiences a slightly different pain, but collectively they create drag. And that drag is what kills adoption.

Ease is often misinterpreted as laziness, as though making something easy means dumbing it down or sacrificing ambition. In reality, ease is a form of humility and respect. It is the decision to remove unnecessary cognitive, procedural, or operational effort so that the customer, and the organisation, can focus on what actually matters. The most successful products almost always feel simple, even when their underlying architecture is sophisticated. That simplicity is not an accident. It is an outcome of design discipline.

Unfortunately, many companies prioritise ease for the business instead of ease for the customer, the distribution network or the market. MVP thinking is a common culprit. The intention behind an MVP is perfectly reasonable: get to market sooner, test the value proposition, accelerate learning. But MVPs are often used as permission to deliver something incomplete, inconsistent, or unnecessarily hard to use. It may be easier for the company to ship something basic, but the customer pays the price in frustration, uncertainty, or extra work. Trust is lost, and once trust is lost, no amount of iteration can fully restore it.

Urgency, whether realistically necessary or unnecessary, also pushes organisations toward premature release. Teams worry about being late to market, about missing a rumoured competitor launch, about losing a perceived first-mover advantage. But being first is only valuable if what you deliver is useful. A competitor in the South African Telecommunications market’s early MPLS product is a perfect example. They were first to market, long before most competitors understood MPLS. But their product, shaped by a desire to make MPLS look familiar to Frame Relay buyers to be sold as a replacement for that service, never realised the full potential of the technology. It sold, but mostly because the market had not yet seen a better option.

When we launched our MPLS VPN product, we took a very different approach. We focused on the core value MPLS could deliver, namely flexible topology, efficient bandwidth aggregation, architectural consistency, service differentiation, and operational clarity. We prioritised ease of understanding for the customer, ease of support for engineering, and ease of maintenance over time. The result was a product that was more aligned to what the market actually needed. Years later, when that business was acquired by ours and both product sets were compared, it became clear that the later product was the one to keep,  not because they had been wrong, but because their product fitted one context and ours fitted the next.

This is the heart of product success. A product must make life easier for everyone who interacts with it. When customers understand exactly what they are buying, when sales teams can position it without theatrics, when operations can deliver it without friction, and when engineering can support it without dread, adoption becomes natural. Products do not succeed because they are clever. They succeed because they reduce friction across the whole system.

Clear Outcomes Remove Hiding Places and Build Real Accountability

Every business wants to grow, and most believe they are pursuing that goal seriously. But growth only becomes real when a company aligns its expectations with what the market can actually support. Competitors growing at nine percent year on year are not simply outperforming you; they are revealing something about the opportunity that exists in the market. That doesn’t mean your business should match them blindly. It means your goals must reflect the difference between what you are achieving and what is achievable within your own constraints, capabilities, and stage of maturity.

This is where many organisations quietly lose their way. They measure themselves against internal forecasts that are often built on convenience rather than ambition, and targets that are shaped by last year’s budget rather than by market reality. When the bar is set internally like this, no one feels the pain of the profits that weren’t won. There is no recognition of the opportunity cost that sits, silent and invisible, behind ordinary performance. And without that recognition, the organisation cannot grow with any real urgency or clarity.

The solution is not to impose unrealistic stretch targets or to shame teams with public scoreboards. That’s the opposite of accountability. Shaming people does not make them responsible; it makes them defensive, cautious, and afraid of visibility. Instead, accountability emerges when outcomes are clear, grounded in market truth, and properly contextualised for the business. Expectations must account for genuine constraints: the readiness of your systems, the maturity of your product set, the capability of your teams, the realities of your customer base, and the operational inertia that cannot be changed within a single budget cycle.

Once goals are set realistically and transparently, they must be communicated clearly, not as weapons, but as orientation. Visibility should exist only where it is useful: among the people who share responsibility for the outcome. Public humiliation has no place in a high-functioning business. What matters is that the teams who own a result can see where they stand in relation to what is possible and can do so without fear of blame.

When goals are clear and honest, political shelter disappears. People cannot hide behind ambiguity. Silos weaken because shared goals force collaboration. Decision-making becomes faster because delay is visible inside the team that must act. Innovation becomes grounded because it exists to close a specific gap, not to impress leadership. And because expectations are rooted in reality, rather than in ideal, people engage with them seriously.

This kind of accountability is not punitive; it is empowering. It gives individuals and teams the psychological clarity to prioritise intelligently, ask better questions, and focus their effort where it actually shifts the trajectory of the business. It replaces vague narratives with real information. It restores the link between strategy and execution. And it strengthens trust, because people understand not just what is expected but also why it is expected and how it connects to the true potential of the market.

Accountability is not consequence. Accountability is clarity. And clarity is the foundation on which responsible, confident, and high-performing organisations are built.

Product Leadership Is the Design of a Repeatable System

If there is a single idea that threads through everything discussed so far, it is this: product leadership is not about features, roadmaps, or isolated acts of innovation. Those are artefacts of the work, not the work itself. Real product leadership is the deliberate design of a system that continues to make good decisions, produce valuable products, and adapt intelligently, even when circumstances change and information is incomplete.

Features age quickly. Technologies become obsolete. Competitors shift direction. Markets evolve. But systems, cultural systems, operational systems, decision-making systems, value-delivery systems, persist. They shape the organisation’s trajectory long after any individual feature, product manager, or quarter’s results are forgotten.

A repeatable system begins with the understanding that a product does not sit inside a marketing brochure. It sits inside a web of interdependent realities: how sales articulate value, how engineering supports the workload, how operations implement and maintain consistency, how finance bills and reconciles revenue, how partners integrate, how service teams explain the model, how procurement on the customer side evaluates risk, and how leadership interprets market signals. A product exists inside all of these contexts simultaneously. When one is ignored, the product suffers.

This is why coherence matters more than brilliance. A mediocre idea delivered through a coherent system will outperform a brilliant idea delivered through a fragmented one. Coherence means that incentives align, information flows early, friction is minimised, truths are spoken while they still matter, and teams understand how their work connects to the broader outcome. Coherence also requires emotional safety, because without it people hide problems, delay decisions, soften bad news, or act politically rather than commercially. When emotional noise is removed from the environment, judgement improves and the system becomes predictable in the best possible way.

A repeatable system is also grounded in fit. It aligns what the market needs with what the organisation can sustainably deliver at scale. It rejects the notion of the “right product” and instead focuses on the product that fits the company’s architecture, capabilities, and culture. It acknowledges compromise not as weakness but as design discipline. And it recognises that copying competitors is not strategy, because their system is not your system.

Perhaps most importantly, a repeatable system embeds ease into every stage of the product’s lifecycle. Ease is not superficial polish; it is the removal of friction across the entire value chain. When the product is easy for the customer to understand, easy for sales to position, easy for engineering to support, and easy for operations to sustain, the organisation is free to focus on improving the product rather than recovering from it. This is where long-term advantage compounds.

The ultimate purpose of product leadership is not to produce a single success. It is to create the conditions in which success becomes normal. When culture, clarity, capability, and context align, the business gains something far more valuable than a one-off innovation. It gains a system that can sense what the market needs, act on it responsibly, adapt without drama, and continue performing even when individual variables change.

In the real world, the organisations that grow consistently are not the ones with the most ambitious ideas or the flashiest launch events. They are the ones with systems that keep working. Systems that surface truth early. Systems that reduce friction. Systems that reward responsibility rather than noise. Systems that match ambition with capability. Systems that empower people to act with intelligence rather than fear.

Product leadership, at its best, is the quiet architecture of those systems. When done well, it looks unremarkable from the outside. But from the inside, it is the reason everything works, and the reason the business keeps moving forward.