Celebrating Productization Success with Your Team & Organization

Jaime Drennan
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Productization is a journey that can involve innovation, digital transformation, and business model changes. Long-term goals of scalable revenue and profitability can often seem far away. This blog aims to give you practices you can bring to your organization to keep your team motivated by identifying and celebrating successes and quick wins.

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There are many ways to define success, including early sales through MVP, industry benchmarking, journey mapping, competitor analysis, customer feedback, and data analysis. Be sure to check out our blog which dives into how to develop these types of early wins. These strategies can help drive internal shifts and validate your efforts throughout the productization process.

While the previous blog focused on achieving quick wins, it's important to recognize that failures can also be celebrated as successes. In service organizations, we often highlight and reward moments when we exceed expectations and share positive customer stories. However, in product discovery, testing an idea—even if it doesn't succeed—should be seen as a win. This approach saves time and money that might otherwise be spent developing a product that your customers won’t actually buy. 

Below, we explore strategies to celebrate productization successes and highlight some practical examples from industry leaders. Here are some effective ways to recognize and celebrate achievements:

 

Ways to Celebrate Wins

  1. Public Recognition: Acknowledge and praise efforts in team meetings, newsletters, or company-wide communications. Social media and internal platforms can be great for this. Look for ways to incorporate into existing meetings, no need to create new forums purely for productization recognition. 
  2. Reward Systems: Implement reward systems with tangible rewards like gift cards, extra time off, or bonuses. Non-monetary rewards like certificates, badges, or personalized thank-you notes can also be effective.
  3. Celebratory Events: Organize small celebrations such as team lunches, happy hours, or virtual events to recognize achievements.
  4. Storytelling: Documenting early successes through case studies or success stories can highlight contributions and motivate the team. Hosting lunch-and-learn sessions to share these stories can also be impactful.
  5. Peer-to-Peer Recognition: Encourage team members to recognize each other's contributions through peer-nominated awards or shout-outs.
  6. Visual Displays: Use visual boards or dashboards to display progress and accomplishments, making achievements visible to the entire team. This is more obvious for those organizations that still go into an office, but can also be beneficial for full remote teams. For example, a real estate services company held an in-person forum with presentations and visual displays of key product concepts they wanted the entire organization to be aware of and discuss.
  7. Commitment to Innovative Efforts: Top employees are motivated to make an impact, and oftentimes more than anything just want to be given the space or permission to continue pursuing an innovation. Being on an innovation project can be a reward in and of itself, especially when budgets so often get cut for these initiatives that employees are excited about. 

 

Ways to Improve Your Celebrations

To make celebrations more meaningful, consider the following tips:

  1. Make it Personal: Tailor recognition to the preferences of the individual or team being recognized. Personalizing the recognition can make it more impactful.
  2. Link to the Bigger Picture: Connect small wins to the larger change initiative to show progress and build a sense of purpose. We encourage you to utilize your Productization Vision Statement and link back to how the win will help you achieve that vision. 
  3. Solicit Feedback: Regularly ask the team what they consider an important win and how they prefer to celebrate. Use this feedback to continuously improve the celebration process. As with almost everything we advise on, your strategy for identifying and celebrating wins can (and should)  be iterated on. 
  4. Be Genuine: avoid praise as "theater" akin to "innovation theater" where you are telling someone they did a great job, but cutting their budget or not supporting the initiative more widely in the organization. Make sure the praise is not hollow or manipulative or it will backfire.

 

Real-World Examples

Here are some practical examples of how our customers celebrate wins:

  1. Gifting & Recognition Programs: 
    1. Bonusly: This platform allows employees to give and receive points that can be redeemed for gift cards or donations. It promotes visibility and recognition across the organization with minimal investment.
    2. Empower Points: Similar to Bonusly, this system allows employees to gather points that can be used to purchase items, from small gifts to significant rewards like Apple Watches.
    3. Others our customers are using include wishlist and snappy.
  2. Team Happy Hours: Some teams celebrate small wins with informal happy hours, creating a camaraderie atmosphere where recent accomplishments are acknowledged and enjoyed.
  3. Customer Feedback Sharing: Sharing positive customer feedback with the entire team can be incredibly motivating. It helps team members see the direct impact of their work and reinforces the value they bring to the customers.
  4. Storytelling and Lunch-and-Learns: Holding sessions where team members share experiences and learnings from small wins can promote knowledge sharing and continuous improvement.
  5. Executive Shoutouts: Quick emails or video messages from leadership, recognizing the efforts of smaller teams or individuals, can reinforce commitment to productization and highlight contributions across the organization.
  6. Committing to Innovation: Committing to the next round of investing in the initiative or applying the recommended approach. Oftentimes teams are busy working on a business case and the biggest win for them is to be able to continue pursuing it based on their recommendations or allow them to pursue a pivot they identified along the way. For example, an engineering services firm we work with held an AI competition company-wide with the top ideas receiving pilot investment to pursue their ideas in beta.

By adopting these strategies, organizations can create a culture of recognition and celebration that supports innovation and continuous improvement. Celebrating wins, both big and small, helps keep the team motivated and focused on the end goal, fostering a positive and productive environment.

 

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