Sustaining

From start-up mode to systems-mode

Sustaining is where all great offerings thrive. Whether you’re running a single product shop or a giant institution, you should be interested in sustaining. The problem is: the transition from Launching to Sustaining can be a rough one. Below, find some guidance on how to shift to Sustaining:

1. When you start seeing repetition in the problems you’re taking on. If you run an agile team, you’ll start seeing the same categories of problems come up in the backlog, in stand up, and in customer meetings. This repetition means that your primary launch has been successful, and you’re moving from everything being a new use case to being able to batch and even anticipate needed moves.

2. When you can systematize what was previously hair-on-fire-inducing. This can be as formal as documenting a process to as informal as achieving team mindshare on one. When processes stop feeling a little edgy and unstable, that means you’re entering the sustaining period.

3. When your multi-skillset folks start seeming a little less energized by the problem set. This is primarily an indicator for the manager or lead of the team, but it can be noticed by anyone. The people who launch a product are rarely the people who want to stay around for years and maintain it. Sometimes, yes, especially if the product is someone’s “baby”, as they say, but many times, once the problem is solved, the primary problem solvers lose a bit of interest.

4. When the team starts navel-gazing or gilding the lily. Incremental changes are part of any product’s development. However, you want to make sure that incremental changes are still valuable changes. When the amazing team you work on or have built starts adding features or processes that you haven’t vetted with customers or that seem like more and more about less and less, it’s time to shift to sustaining mode.

5. When the team starts building new offerings out of the core offering. You hired a great, motivated team, and that’s wonderful. But all offerings and organzations have boundaries on what they can sustain. It’s the role of management to draw those boundaries and communicate them to motivated teams. If your people start coming up with great ideas and there’s organizational space for them, push them to explore that development, but not as part of the core team. The core team needs to focus on ensuring the primary offering continues to function and evolve with the customer at its center.

5 Actions to take to shift

1. Start the conversation with your stakeholders and team as early as possible. This shift is deep change management; it means letting go of the magic that built the product and embracing a new way of working.

2. Intentionally assign motivated personal to achievements that need to be met with a launch mindset. One issue that’s often underbaked at launch is establishing sustainable customer pipelines. That might not be the skill set of any of your initial team members, but there are problems inside that problem that almost certainly are. Set your energetic team’s sites on that problem to help feed their launch energy without running the risk of overworking the core offering.

3. Create off ramps for folks who will not need to stay in the sustainment phase, and onramps for those who will.** This means working with stakeholders to reassign individuals to meet the needs of an offering that is becoming institutionalized. This can be a long process. In our experience, it can take up to a year, so start early (see point 1), and give it time.

4. Embrace the slower pace. Launching is about proof of concept, but sustaining is about proof of value, and proving value is simply a longer road than building and testing a model. But if you’ve been in start up mode for a year or more, you might find yourself struggling to focus. Hold tight to the reality that no business—not even ones who brag that they do, like a certain giant online retail, delivery, and web infrastructure company—stays in start up mode forever. Institutionalization is a good move if you want your business to last a long time, focus on customers, and continue to solve their problems.

5. Know yourself. You might not be a sustainer, in which case it’s on you to be vocal about needing to move on, find a way to do that, and to offload your work with intentionality and kindness so that others can guide the ship successfully after you leave.

Conclusion

The operations around Delivery are more definable and bound than those around other parts of the human-centered design process, but that doesn’t mean there’s a single track to take. Each one of these phases—Training, Marketing, Launching, and Sustaining—are their own professional verticals. If you have the resources, reach out to professionals in these fields to help you figure out the best path forward for your offering. If you do not have those resources, follow the guidance in this Delivery Operations Guide as well as in the Delivery Concept Guide.

Now that you’re through the Delivery Phase, it’s time to gather data and measure the impact of your work. Follow us to the next phase: Measurement.