Innovation is the new normal and today, every business is becoming a software business. Software is getting exponentially cheaper and easier to work with, and design touches everything we experience. We live in interesting times. And with all this come big challenges for business, not least the search for the right talent who get all of the above and can reliably deliver exceptional new products and services. Yet 18 years on from publication of “The War for Talent”, there is a marked scarcity of digital capabilities in the workforce.

Finding your audience, building the right product – these may be the basics, but for many organisations they are far from easy to achieve. Here at Made by Many we take much of our daily process, mindset and approach for granted, yet the more clients we meet and engage with, the more we understand that what is second nature to us is absolutely nonstandard for the majority. In particular, it's not enough to simply recruit a product software team, deploy them on a project, and hope for the best.

Innovation is risky, and Made by Many exists to help clients mitigate that risk by bringing our experience and knowledge to bear.

If innovation is the new normal, then businesses need new capabilities to be successful. This is where one flavour of the “Made by Made by Many” model comes in: building a digital product team from scratch – a multi-stage recruitment and training process that sets our clients up for success. Drawing on our years of experience in leading-edge product development, we offer clients the capability to leapfrog the difficult challenge of finding the right people who can make their new digital business flourish.

Why do we do this? Often, because a project has the word “digital” attached to it, businesses make the leap to assume that an IT department can manage it, or that the marketing department can handle it because they deal with “digital” – i.e. marketing channels – every day. That way of thinking fundamentally misunderstands what “digital first” involves: to be successful with digital products, a company needs to adopt a “pull” dynamic with its market, understand customers’ unmet needs and redesign processes to facilitate a responsive capacity. Strategy, technology and design in combination solve these problems, but these aren’t typical core competencies represented in IT and marketing departments.

A Case in Point: Composed by Made by Many for Universal Music Group

Working with Universal Music for the past couple of years, we successfully created, developed and launched Composed, a radical direct-to-consumer classical music service for two on the greatest classical labels in existence, Decca and Deutsche Grammophon. Their vast catalogues were becoming dormant assets in the face of declining CD sales and a growing majority of more casual classical listeners, and Universal Music asked Made by Many to explore opportunities to address this untapped market. We've written about this here.

The Composed project is a great example of how one of our Made by Made by Many models works, and what follows is an outline of the process which worked for Universal.

It’s an extensible model that can be applied in different fields where “digital first” and digital product innovation is the goal. Whether in financial services, healthcare, or travel, the principles are the same:

1. First, think about what's needed: building a digital product requires a set of skills and a mindset that is substantially different from your business as usual. As music specialists, Universal were new to the field of digital product innovation and needed our expertise and network to recruit the right kind of people.

2. Next, find out who's got what's needed: screen CVs, interview candidates, and select a team while being mindful of how they will integrate as a unit. Hire someone who can lead first – teams working on projects such as this need a shared vision, mindset and sensibility. Above all, they will all be passionate about serving unmet customer needs.

3. Then, incubate the team: in the Made by Made by Many model, each member is individually matched with and trained by one of our specialists: designers are coached by designers, developers by developers. The embryonic product is handed over to this new team who adopt the working processes, tools and skills that have informed the product's development up to this point, establishing a roadmap and a set of principles to guide decisions around that product.

This is important: at Made by Many we've refined our processes over eight years because we know that they deliver results. Moreover, the aim of this model is to imbue those skills and understanding in the client team that will eventually take over the running of the product.

4. Let it grow. Over a period of 6-9 months, the team continues to be mentored and coached by experienced Made by Many staff, with on-the-job training tailored to each individual's needs.

5. Dock into the mothership: preparations are made on the client side to welcome the product team in-house, considering factors such as office location and how the team will work. This is important because the kind of people who have a product-focused startup mentality tend to have some prerequisites – for example, spaces with plenty of natural light, the ability to interact easily (rather than in enclosed pens), an inspiring physical environment in which to work, good coffee.

5.1 Culture and sensibility really matter. High-agency millennials (often the kind of people who make startups successful) have fewer of the fears common to Generation Y, less of an “I'd better toe the line or I’m out” mentality. If a job doesn't suit them, they'll go elsewhere. That's an uncomfortable fact of life in the War For Talent.

6: Norming within the parent company. This can be where the going gets tough, since it's where the team can run into cultural issues between legacy processes and adaptive, lean or agile practices. We've found that it's best to find the sweet spot between the two, and build bridges between them. It's worth saying again that team members who bring the skills and vision necessary for innovating new products and services – software designers, developers and strategists – are, on the whole, looking for some particular qualities in the work they do. Rather than being driven simply by salary or company perks, they're likely to put greater value on sense of purpose, satisfaction of a job done to the best of their ability, capacity for collaborative team-working, and a (very uncorporate) culture of open-ness and honesty. Our model helps identify the skillsets and capabilities the client is going to need to recruit in order to successfully run - and grow - the new digital business we've helped them build.

How to Get it Right

The following is a useful set of considerations for companies to think about to ensure that a new digital product team will be set up for success – insights we've found to be valuable when applying the Made by Made by Many model with clients:

1. Leadership: if all things are equal (and you don't have an immediate need to plug a coding or design gap) hire the team lead first. That person is likely to be the energetic visionary who can translate your business strategy into operational reality.

2. Motivation: consider what energises the type of team you're trying to attract. It may not be the same as that which attracts employees to your core business.

3. Autonomy: create a structure within your organisation that gives your embedded team its head, so that they can work in the way they want and need to. Don't bog them down with legacy organisational structures and processes if you can possibly avoid it.

4. Infrastructure: Think about the infrastructure the team will need when they re-bed into the parent company: what kind of training provision might you need to make? (it's likely to be something new for your HR team to consider). Who will look after the team's general wellbeing as they make the transition into the mothership? Who will they report to? Will they have a PA or someone who can facilitate them plugging into parent company systems?

Risks, Rewards and How to Avoid Failure

This process isn’t without risks. It’s conceivable that that once a team is embedded in the parent company, it proves impossible to sustain what was built up in their formative months: culture, practices, clarity of purpose, untrammelled energy.

On the other hand, the potential rewards are great, and first among them is the ability to make the right thing that won’t fail. Answering a real need in the real world is one thing, but all too often, organisations who achieve it find that (as above) they’re unable to manage it. Business practice often works against the ability to make products that evolve over time.

This is a model that can deliver transformation. In the case of Composed, the project has positioned Universal Music as a digital-first business, and set them up for the future with an owned platform and owned IP, amid the ongoing proliferation of music streaming services. Similarly, classical music, perhaps more than any other genre, needs its own transition to the digital era. Composed, by virtue of being a beautifully nuanced product designed for classical music listeners, has guaranteed classical music’s place in the digital present and future.

A final note: this is only one variant of our Made by Made by Many model: others include teaching design research to client teams, in-housing external development teams for ongoing knowledge transfer, and helping organisations go “digital first”.

If you're interested in hearing more about those, or the process we've outlined above, get in touch with us at letsmeet@madebymany.com