See how integrating agile and innovation frameworks can transform product development and boost market leadership.
Chris Li, SVP of Products at Xactly
Christopher (Chris) Li is the Senior Vice President of Products at Xactly, the leader in intelligent revenue solutions. Chris is an accomplished strategy leader with a focus on guiding customers through digital transformations that maximize business outcomes.
Chris, please give us an overview of your role at Xactly, its approach to product development, and how it has evolved in recent years.
As the SVP of Products at Xactly, I manage Xactly’s global Product Strategy, Product Management, Product Marketing, Product Operations and Product Success functions and am responsible for optimizing Xactly’s products to reinforce our position as the only AI-powered platform that combines revenue intelligence and sales performance management to help organizations transform their revenue operations. In my role, I focus on formulating and executing product strategies that drive sustainable competitive differentiation and market leadership, allowing organizations to unlock their full revenue potential.
Our approach to product management has evolved substantially over the years. We’ve complemented our annual roadmapping process with a long-term innovation framework and a short-term agile development process. This allows us to balance our focus on where we need to go over the next few years with what we need to get done in the next quarter or two.
What inspired Xactly to move from a traditional annual product roadmap to a multi-year innovation framework and quarterly agile development process?
Technology is evolving at a pace we’ve never seen before and with the emergence of Generative AI, the pace is only going to accelerate. Xactly has also been on a portfolio management transformation for the past few years; maturing from a multi-product organization to a true platform-first organization. To allow us to exploit the ever-changing technological climate and to effectively execute upon our product strategy transformation, we realized we needed to institute ancillary processes around the traditional annual roadmap planning process.
How do you balance the need for long-term visibility with the flexibility of short-term agile planning?
Although an annual roadmap establishes the key areas of focus for the upcoming year, agile development ensures we’re decomposing our roadmap into manageable bodies of work to allow us to deliver new features and products in a highly predictable way. By incorporating a multi-year innovation framework, we’re able to objectively determine where we should be placing our bigger bets and track the potential impact of those innovations along their journey to market.
What were the biggest challenges Xactly faced when transitioning to this new agile development approach, and how were they overcome?
The risk of change fatigue comes with any process transformation. We’ve discovered significant operational benefits by applying our quarterly agile process, which we’ve leveraged for a few years now. Earlier this year, we determined it would be best if we temporarily pause making additional changes to the process to allow our R&D teams to focus on executing the process, rather than continuing to refine it.
How has the adoption of a multi-year innovation framework impacted Xactly’s ability to innovate and respond to technological changes?
Our multi-year innovation framework has had a profound impact on our ability to innovate and respond to technological changes. We now have the capacity and tools to objectively assess the choices we should make, which could take multiple years to manifest into material benefits for our customers. Innovation is typically one of the most difficult things to get right. However, it’s required if you want to stay ahead of the market. The harsh reality is that most long-term innovation attempts don’t pay off for organizations. We’re using our innovation framework to stay on the right side of that equation.
How has the shift to a quarterly agile development process affected team dynamics and collaboration within Xactly?
Xactly has always been a highly collaborative organization, but the application of our agile development process has unlocked a whole new level of cross-functional collaboration. In most research and development (R&D) organizations, engineering and product are separate functions expected to work closely together. That’s the case at Xactly. But with the agile development process, our teams operate as one. Due to the planning we incorporate into the process, we’ve also seen the collaboration with our peers in go-to-market and customer experience improve as well. The process drives visibility and alignment.
In what ways has customer feedback been integrated into the agile planning process, and how has it influenced product development?
Software companies take risks in various ways to drive innovation and stay competitive, such as adapting new technologies like AI. Since we are constantly taking risks, we need rapid and timely feedback to determine what’s working and what requires a pivot. At Xactly, we leverage a launch strategy which allows us to release new capabilities in phases to solicit feedback early and often before those capabilities go to general availability (GA). For example, we might release a new capability to pilot, where technically the feature is code-complete, but we expose it to select customers, internal stakeholders, and partners to work with it and provide feedback. This allows us to apply improvements to the capability as we progress through the Beta phase; such that when we get to GA we’ve hardened the capability and have a degree of confidence regarding the value it will unlock for our customers.
What metrics or key performance indicators does Xactly use to measure the success of its agile development and multi-year innovation framework?
The KPIs we measure related to our agile development process are primarily focused on velocity and adherence to the committed scope. This ensures we’re building and shipping code quickly. The measurements of success for our innovation framework are different and depend on the innovation we’re contemplating. Those measurements could be related to validating product-market fit, understanding the potential profitability of the capability, or even bringing clarity to the total development timeline.
What advice would you give to other software enterprises looking to implement a similar agile development and innovation framework?
My advice would be not trying to operationalize both of these processes at the same time. First, you should identify what the biggest current challenge is and if it is related to development velocity and alignment or related to driving competitive differentiation. Based on that, choose the most appropriate process that addresses the current challenge. Then when operationalizing one of these processes, ensure you have executive buy-in and acknowledge it will likely take multiple years to get right. With the proper governance model, organizations will know when they’ve optimized enough and can then reap the benefits of the improved process.
How do you foresee the agile development process evolving at Xactly in the next few years, and what future trends do you anticipate in product roadmapping and innovation?
In the next few years, I’m looking forward to continuing to increase our pace of innovation leveraging these processes. We’ve taken the time to build an integrated framework balancing short-term and long-term planning and we can now benefit from that.
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