"Ideas are cheap. It's the execution that is all important"
Launching a venture or product is a hard thing. 30,000 new consumer products hit the market every year, but only 40% survive. And startups? Just a 30% success rate after five years. Even corporate ventures backed by resources only meet expectations about half the time.
At dualoop, we see the same pattern: teams move too fast, without testing key assumptions or managing the risks. That’s why we believe product management is one of the best tools for successful venture building.
This article shares some of the lessons we explored during a recent live talk with Novable. We discussed how to apply product thinking to build smarter, move faster, and avoid mistakes, whether you’re launching a new product or creating a new business.
In the end, everything we do is risk mitigation. Let’s explore that together.
"Venture building is the structured, repeatable creation of new businesses (often within or alongside existing organizations) through the systematic ideation, incubation, and scaling of ventures" - McKinsey & Company, 2022
Why venture building benefits from product thinking
Launching new ventures is just as hard as launching new products and often even riskier. What makes venture building unique is that you’re building both the product and the organisation at the same time. It’s not just about launching a product, it’s about creating a business around it. That means solving real problems for real people, while making the whole thing sustainable. But too often, teams fall into the trap of building solutions before they fully understand the problem.
That’s where product management comes in.
Product thinking forces you to slow down before speeding up. It starts with questions like: Who are we solving this for? What’s the core problem? Why now? Instead of rushing to launch, you focus on creating value for both the customer and the business.
“Product management is the discipline of maximising value created for the customer and the business over the lifetime of a product.” - Melissa Perri
The product loop: a tool to reduce risk
This is where product thinking makes the difference. Every product manager knows the loop: understand the problem, explore solutions, deliver something small, measure what happens, then learn and iterate. This loop works just as well for building ventures as it does for features.
By applying product thinking across this loop, venture teams reduce uncertainty and avoid building solutions without validated problems.
4 risks every venture must manage
When building a new venture, speed isn’t the only challenge…risk is (and not just market risk). Venture builders face the same four risks identified by Eric Ries, but at the company rather than the product level:
"Product managers are the shepherds of risk, not the owners of output." - Melissa Perri, Escaping the build trap.
In traditional venture building, teams often over-focus on execution, building a solution without confirming if it’s the right one. But product thinking flips that approach. It starts with framing the problem, validating demand, and testing viability before scaling.
As Martin said: “You don’t de-risk by executing better. You de-risk by learning faster.”
Product management gives you the tools to test bold ideas without betting the whole farm, and that’s what modern venture building needs.
From zero to hero: what product thinking unlocked
Let’s make this concrete. A few years back, a client asked Martin to explore a new business model.
There was no product and no team. Instead of building first, the focus was on learning, and the venture was shaped from scratch using product management fundamentals:
That venture rolled out in many countries in under 12 months, and is part of a well-valued business. The takeaway? Product thinking helps you test bold ideas without overcommitting. When you start by managing risk, you can move faster and scale smarter.
Beyond the product loop: collaborative innovation
Product management helps you reduce uncertainty, but what happens when you need to align multiple teams, partners, or even whole organisations? That’s where Novable’s expertise in collaboration comes in.
Venture building doesn’t work well in silos: you need the right people, the right setup, and the right model to move forward together. That’s where Novable’s approach comes in:
- Clear collaboration models
- The porosity concept: building trust across teams
- Shared risk validation
- A framework to match your venture goal to the right model
The key? Innovation is more about working together in the right way from the start than about speed and following a linear process. But even with the right model, success still depends on how people work together inside the organisation.
The human side of venturing
One of the most overlooked parts of venture building isn’t the idea, the tech, or the process, it’s the human layer.
During our conversation with Novable, Laurent Kinet shared a useful model to unlock this layer of collaboration. He calls it porosity : the ability for people, ideas, and ways of working to flow between teams and organisations.
True collaboration happens on three levels:
Most corporate-startup partnerships fail because one side tries to control instead of collaborate. Rather than trying to “manage innovation,” start creating space to “host transformation”.
This mindset shift starts by focusing on people, culture, and trust.
Choosing the right model for the job
There isn’t just one way to build ventures, there are dozens. In fact, Novable has mapped over 50 venture models, each suited to different innovation goals.
The trick is to match the model to your strategic objective.
Ask yourself:
- Are you trying to enter a new market?
- Explore emerging tech?
- Solve internal inefficiencies?
- Create a new revenue stream?
The right model depends on the outcome you want to drive. With the right model, venture building can become your most powerful innovation engine.
Conclusion
If there’s one thing to remember from our session, it’s this: you can’t eliminate risk but you can manage it. Product thinking helps venture teams slow down at the right moments, test what matters, and build what works. Strategic partnerships and collaborative ecosystems help reduce venture risk by creating the right support system around the team, with the right people, tools, and goals from the start.
This approach doesn’t guarantee success, but it does give you a better shot at building something useful, sustainable, and aligned with real needs!
