Strategies for Startups Navigating a Tougher Funding Landscape

Ongoing economic and political uncertainty has been causing the VC landscape to run at an exhausting pace. That means general partners (GPs) and managing directors are applying a laser focus on those startups in their portfolio that are poised for rapid growth.

How startups can accelerate growth in a new funding landscape

Innovation doesn’t have to come with a hefty headcount. By partnering with an innovation consultancy, startups can access the specialized expertise they need to navigate critical growth phases without the long-term commitment of additional full-time staff. 

Spotlight on: Brandt Roberts, Head of Growth

Brandt Roberts’ career has spanned operations, venture and private equity. Joining Sightglass enables Brandt to apply that experience to help early-stage start-ups scale impactfully and efficiently.

Why founders should care if they are optimized for delivery or discovery

Knowing whether your product innovation process is optimized for delivery or discovery can significantly impact a product’s success and its users’ satisfaction. Which process your organization optimizes comes down to what it values: outcomes or outputs. 

Case Study: De-risking Innovation

When ideas are abundant but resources limited, how do you prioritize what innovation efforts will deliver actual value?

AI Feedback Loops

If we want AI systems that get better over time and truly fulfill their potential, they will have to be implemented in a way that allows for new divergent paths and course correction. Otherwise, we’ll find ourselves running in loops.

Sightglass earns LGBT Business Enterprise certification

Sightglass Partners is excited to announce the firm’s certification as an LGBT Business Enterprise® by the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce, the national business voice of the LGBT community.

Three ways GenAI can improve your product experience

Advancements in Generative AI (or GenAI) have prompted a surge in companies striving to address the question: “How do we integrate AI into your product roadmaps?” 

Insight with Foresight Webinar: How do I integrate AI into my business?

In this webinar, John Jarosz chats with data scientist, journalist and member of the Sightglass Network, Gary Biggs, about how to integrate AI into your business practices.

Ensure Your Best Ideas Don’t Get Trapped In A ‘Black Box’

In every organization, some roles have what I like to describe as a “black box” problem: Other team members know these roles are valuable, but they aren’t exactly sure what tangible value they provide. No one can accurately describe what these folks do until something tactical is released.

Case Study: Building an Innovation Culture

An innovation culture is an excellent ideal. How do you build one that works in the real world?

Putting humanity into automation

Generative AI products GPT-4 and ChatGPT are clearly groundbreaking innovations. But can they generate transformative new ideas? New products, services, and businesses will certainly be built using AI — potentially with greater speed and efficiency than ever before. But don’t confuse the novelty of seemingly cogent outputs from language models with meaningful results — or valuable outcomes. 

Is Your Roadmap Road Blocked? Optimizing Cross-Functional Teams

While most of us involved in product design and delivery will agree that innovation is complex, we all have different reasons as to why it’s so hard. My theory? Successful innovation must involve cross-functional teams—and yet cross-functional teams are notoriously at cross-purposes.

Spotlight on: Marc De Pape, Principal Product Consultant

Marc first met future Sightglass founders John Jarosz, Matthew Tobiasz, and Patti Purcell at Thoughtworks, where he was a designer with a compulsion to understand why a particular strategic path was being taken. Now as part of the Sightglass Team, Marc is helping companies ensure that what they’re building will actually deliver a better customer experience and overall ROI.

Seeing ahead by looking back

Just over a year ago, three friends—a product designer, a technologist, and a business strategist—joined forces to launch a different innovation consultancy.

Empowering a newly acquired start-up for enterprise innovation

When large enterprises need to accelerate growth and secure their market position, purchasing a promising start-up can be a pragmatic approach to expanding their product portfolio and broadening or deepening their capabilities.

Combining companies starts with aligning your people on the experience

For enterprise companies that make acquisition part of their growth strategy, a lack of team alignment creates an “us-versus-them” scenario that blocks innovation.

Outside-In perspective gives incoming CPO much-needed foresight

The role of Chief Product Officer can cover many core functions. It can include go-to-market strategy, but it can also include project and operational management and even feature decisions, design and analysis. Finding one person who is an expert within all of these areas is like finding the unicorn every start-up is trying to become.

An Employee Stack is the backbone of your Employee Experience

Take the same diligence you bring to your product experience to build a more practical and efficient employee experience.

An employee journey maps the route to improved employee experiences

Considerable time is spent on the customer journey, but what do we know of our employee journey?

Employee Experience design starts with making work easy

Since remote and hybrid working is not going to change, it’s time to revisit how we design employee experiences.  

Spotlight on: Jessi O’Neill, Principal Design Consultant

Jessi O’Neill, Principal Design Consultant at Sightglass, has worked with the world’s leading workforce and HR management services companies, where she was accountable for designing, operationalizing, and scaling customer-centric product experiences.

The DE&I value proposition

The (very welcome) uptick in diversity-led private equity firms is prompting many in the space to look at themselves and their portfolio through a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive lens. Not only because it’s the right thing to do – it’s a way to give your firm a distinctly strategic value proposition.

Make DE&I less daunting

Implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I) principles into your product and service experience, you bring more relevance to your end-users and create a more impactful and lasting emotional reaction that builds customer loyalty and additional useability. But it can also seem like a daunting exercise.  

Experience exponential growth

If you want to see 2X the growth across your portfolio of companies, hire a management consultancy to enhance operations. Want 3X the growth? Hire a design and delivery firm to make more profitable products. But if you want 50X the growth across your entire portfolio of business, focus on the end-user experience.

Digital transformation:
fails and fixes

Digital transformations often feel lack-lustre – or fail outright – because the program only focused only on ways to digitize products, services, and processes. But you’re still left with the same conflicted relationships to customers.