As a start-up founder the most common and crucial question I’m asked is: “what is the problem you are solving?”
Investors, partners, customers and our product design team all demand an answer to this question.
Our software company, dedicated to delivering solutions for the change management discipline, offer two core products: the Change Workspace and Matae.
With our Change Workspace product we address a common frustration for change managers, spending too much time doing low value tasks (to produce high value outputs) that limits the time they can spend on more impactful work with people.
Our Matae product tackles a more holistic or organisation-wide problem, and we believe a root cause of organisational failure to achieve the business outcomes from change programs. The problem: Leaders (managers and supervisors) do not focus effort on change for long enough to move the needle.
Clearly defining the problems we are solving helps us focus our efforts, ensures we can articulate and demonstrate the value we deliver to clients and most importantly attract investment.
Your Start-up question as a Change Manager
So, my question to you as a change manager is, what problem are you solving? In the context of change management this is a fascinating question to explore.
As change managers we do a lot of stuff. We do analysis, we do comms, we do training, we track sentiment, seek feedback, co-design solutions, the list goes on. But what is the primary problem we solve and how would we articulate this to your investors - and when I say investors I mean your executive?
Thought Starters
Poor Adoption
If project teams are responsible for solution delivery, is the problem we are solving for, anticipated poor adoption? Or is it deeper than that. Is poor adoption simply a symptom of a deeper problem that we solve?
This question is a Pandora's box as there are so many potential causes of poor adoption, from capacity, to culture, to leadership behaviour, to solution design – some within the control of Change Managers and some not.
Now I don’t have a definitive answer to this question. My purpose for this blog post is to be a thought and conversation starter.
What would your CEO say?
It would be fascinating to ask your CEO what problem they think change managers solve. I dare say many may draw a blank – this should ring alarm bells for all change professionals.
In the start-up world you're taught that if you can't articulate the problem you solve, you will very quickly die! If as change managers if we cannot answer this question, then we won’t attract the investment from our executive and we risk suffering the same fate.
So what’s the problem you solve for your business?
Matt Dragun is the Founder and Managing Director of Matae. Matae provides software that helps organisations accelerate the adoption of new technologies and ways of working. Matae and Agencia Change are providing the Agencia Change community with an interactive product review of Matae’s new web-based offering, Change Workspace.
To participate in the interactive review, or for more information on Change Workspace and Matae, click here: https://www.changeworkspace.io/try-for-free-agencia-change and follow along with our articles in the Agencia Change blog.
For more: https://www.agenciachange.com/news
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