Want to innovate faster? First, get everyone rowing in the same direction — culture, strategy and customers aligned for real growth.
Before you can scale innovation, you need to get your house in order — operationally, strategically and culturally.
When I stepped into the role of president at CSG Forte, I knew I wasn’t just inheriting a payments product. I was taking the reins of a complex business in a fast-moving industry shaped by technology, regulation, competition and customer expectations.
In situations like this, it’s tempting to focus on hype — AI, new features, next-gen tools. But innovation doesn’t start with technology. It starts inside the business.
Over the past year, I’ve made changes to grow the business — some big, some small — to align product and innovation with what customers actually need. And it has changed how we operate.
Here are five steps that you can take to drive meaningful transformation in your business, from the inside out.
1. Row together or drift apart
When I came into the role, I saw smart, driven people working hard, but not in sync. Sales, marketing, product, compliance — everyone was rowing fast, but in different boats and different directions. Without shared goals, a business can’t move forward.
We needed to get everyone in the same boat and rowing in the same direction.
We started by setting three shared goals across departments, around revenue margins, product performance and, crucially, customer satisfaction.
It is critical to put the customer at the core of your strategy. When everyone’s focused on the customer — through outcomes and support — profitability will follow.
To make those goals happen, we reconfigured incentive structures across teams and leadership. Incentive plans are standard for sales teams, but in many companies, other teams aren’t included. They follow different bonus structures or corporate plans that don’t reflect the same urgency. We changed that. We built shared metrics and restructured incentives so every team could tie their work to business growth. This alignment made success repeatable.
With everyone focused on the same goals, we weren’t just rowing — we were racing.
2. Embrace a bias toward action
Growth doesn’t happen by accident, especially in a complex, B2B space like payments. It takes intention, structure and alignment across every team. Innovation isn’t a department. It’s a mindset your culture must embody.
To build that mindset, I focused on two things:
A. Organizational design
At this point, everyone was in the same boat, rowing toward the north star. But were they in the right seat?
Where people sit in a boat affects balance, speed, rhythm and stability. Companies tend to optimize around individuals instead of the goals of the business. That slows everyone down.
We restructured teams to ensure we had the right people, with the right skills, in the right roles, setting us up for expansion and scalability.
B. A culture of action
The second shift was cultural. I pushed my leaders to develop a bias toward action.
Too many meetings ended with good ideas and no outcomes. That doesn’t work. Now, every idea gets an owner and a timeline. We break big goals into small moves. We track progress, adjust quickly and keep moving.
You can’t boil the ocean. Focus on what’s achievable — one step at a time. It’s not just about doing more. It’s about tying every action to a customer outcome and measuring real progress, not just good intent.
When innovation becomes everyone’s job, things change. People move with clarity. Teams act faster. And the culture shifts from planning to doing.
3. Foster trust to stop the leaks
Customer retention matters as much as growth, especially when you run on a recurring revenue model. After all, how fast can a leaky boat really go?
But most companies manage churn reactively. I wanted to flip that approach.
The biggest shift? Transparency.
Too often, companies overpromise, hide delays or rush to meet an arbitrary deadline. I’ve seen it happen in every kind of business. Leaders want to save face, so they keep customers at arm’s length. That short-term thinking creates long-term risk.
We took a different approach.
We started pulling customers into the process. We shared updates early and often: what was going well, where we were struggling and how we could solve things together.
Customers respect that. They’re leaders too. They value giving input to help shape better outcomes. It’s not a zero-sum game. When we build together, we all win.
Now, transparency only works if it’s followed by action and improvement. And you can’t fix what you don’t measure. We rolled out a red, yellow, green scorecard to track quantitative and qualitative progress across every initiative. It was a simple, scalable system that provided visibility all the way up to the executive team. It let leadership see where we were falling behind, pinpoint the blockers and facilitate additional support to create success for customers.
4. Keep the customer at the heart of everything
The most innovative teams stay anchored to one thing: the customer. It’s how we make sure every product decision leads to real impact.
Start with empathy. To revisit the boating analogy, make your customer your north star. Customer satisfaction should guide every initiative.
That means more than customer targeting and behavioral analysis. To achieve true growth and innovation, walk a mile in the customer’s shoes. Live their experience. Look holistically at their full journey and consider what it demands now and in the future.
Then don’t settle for good — solve for great. How could the product be improved even further? What would make it not just functional, but exceptional? That mindset unlocks the next level of innovation.
Next, you must evaluate those changes. We use a two-by-two matrix to plot effort versus return. It helps us prioritize what delivers real value and can scale. This approach keeps us grounded. We keep testing. We keep improving. We build what lasts.
5. Slow down to scale faster
Ultimately, the biggest trap many leaders fall into is moving too fast for the wrong reasons. They chase trends, launch features or push new partnerships without first fixing the foundations. If your operations are messy, your strategy unclear or your culture disconnected, innovation won’t stick and it definitely won’t scale.
The most important work is often the quietest: evaluating the business, aligning incentives, identifying problems, implementing measurement tools, changing perspectives and building trust. That’s what sets the stage for lasting progress.
It also protects you from distractions. Take the current AI hype. We’ve all seen the rush to shoehorn it into every product, whether it belongs there or not. But if the use case is flimsy or the ROI isn’t clear, you’re not innovating. You’re reacting. And when you over-index on buzzwords, you lose focus and your customer suffers.
Once your house is in order, you can grow with intention. You can focus on what matters and say no to what doesn’t. You can find the right partners to complement your strengths, opening the door to broader reach, better pricing and more tailored solutions. Then growth stops feeling like a grind and starts becoming a byproduct of shared value.
If you want to lead change, slow down and think about the big picture. Make sure your boat is seaworthy, your crew is aligned and your course is charted — before you pick up speed. Then it’s full steam ahead.
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