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. 

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. 

Insight with Foresight

In this webinar, Sightglass Partner, John Jarosz chats with Christopher Naismith, CEO and founder of Audette.io. John and Christopher chat about the challenges and opportunities facing climate tech founders.

Putting windows on the AI Black Box

Artificial intelligence can do amazing things, but in many cases, we have no idea how those systems make their decisions. The lack of visibility, transparency and usability inherent to foundational AI technologies is often attributed to the nature of the AI “black box” — or how models can only be evaluated by their outputs.

Insight with Foresight: How can DEI support innovation?

Sightglass Partner, John Jarosz chats with Lindsey TH Jackson, CEO of LTHJ Global and founder of SourjournDEI. Lindsey shares her experiences working with investors and consultants as a BIPOC tech founder.

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.

AI’s Promise For More Humane Technology

There’s plenty of cynicism around the opportunities of generative AI—much of it warranted. (No, I don’t want a “poison bread sandwich,” thank you very much, Savey Meal bot.) However, I see two key events as creating the ideal conditions for AI to prompt a fundamental shift in how we can make technology more humane.

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.

Feeling behind on AI? An AI Governance Team puts you a step ahead

ChatGPT has triggered a gold rush of companies planning some implementation of a large language model (LLM) to transform their business.

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: Discovering the right problem to solve

Like many start-ups, PartnerSlate was built on the experience and expertise of its founders.

Top Five Habits That Business Schools Should Be Teaching

Disclosure: While I’ve been counseling business leaders for over a decade, I do not have an MBA. I earned my master’s in human-computer interaction, a form of cognitive psychology that makes me a (cough, cough) humanities grad.

Ensuring Your Merger Is Greater Than The Sum Of Its Acquired Parts

The goal of a merger or acquisition is to create a new entity that’s greater than the sum of its parts. When that merger involves product suites spanning multiple services on either side, the level of complexity rises exponentially—but so does the growth potential.

Whitepaper: DE&I: An Integrated Perspective

DE&I isn’t just good for your community.
It’s good for business.

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.

How To Rally An Innovative Business Culture

When most of us think of an innovation culture, we think of a workplace where teams can “move fast and break things.”

Whitepaper: Win in the Workplace. Win in the Marketplace.

In this whitepaper, Sightglass Partner, Patti Purcell, observes that for businesses to win in the marketplace, they must first win in the workplace.

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.

Dismantling silos and aligning teams in Enterprise Organizations

There are many pitfalls that companies fall into when multiple teams deliver on a broader vision.

The disruption is the experience

Technology doesn’t drive disruption. Experience does.

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 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?

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.

Starting up?
Start with DE&I 

Over the last number of years, DE&I has become a mega-trend, not for great headlines but for great business. Your goal as a founder is to zig while others are zagging, and DE&I is an element you don’t want to ignore.

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.