Speed Layers: Managing the exponential change of technology

Late 19th, early 20th century city people of the world felt overwhelmed by the rapidity of change. The technology was evolving at an exponential pace and suddenly there were cars instead of horses on the streets and evening news as well as daily news doubling the rate of required information intake. Today in the 21st century there are no signs of slow down, if anything technological change is accelerating with an unprecedent speed and news from all over the world is just once push notice away.

Industries are created and destroyed. Disruption is happening every day. Who remembers Blockbuster, Kodak, the state-run postal service, when you had to go to the bank to pay your bills? The complexity of the ecosystems all technology is existing in is increasing, the competition is fiercer and if you don’t innovate you will be out. Yesterday it was cloud, big data, 3D printing, block chain today it is IoT, deep learning, edge computing – what will it be tomorrow?

In short, we need to build more complex technologies, with more interdependencies faster. The Agile revolution is partly trying to address the challenge, but it is not enough. We need new perspectives on time and speed. Perspectives enabling short term monetization while pursuing investments in new core technologies for long term success.

Enters Speed Layers, a conceptual product management framework that will allow for your product strategy, design, development and verification to operate in different speeds. All things needed to build sustainable and loved products like validation and verification, sales projects, market entries, development of new technology etc. can be placed in different speed layers.

Each speed layer shall receive its unique priorities, ways of working and decision-making process. We want to have speed in execution on sales activities, in prototyping and testing and catching up with competition, but a slower more thoughtful strategic evaluation on implementing a new technology platform or entering/creating a new ecosystem. The definition of quality, financing and decision-making process for each layer will be different.

The concept of Speed Layers has been successfully implemented at a number of tech companies. Lessons-learned and keys to success will be shared, but the journey will be all yours.