A brilliant idea is born in a strategy meeting—a new digital product that will delight customers and bring new revenue to the company. It could be an innovative app, a mobile wallet, an IoT service, or a unique bundle of streaming and mobile data. The team is filled with enthusiasm.
A year passes. The project is bogged down in internal committees, technical compliance reviews, budget revisions, and endless negotiations between departments. In the meantime, a small, agile startup launches a nearly identical product on the market, capturing the customer’s attention first.
If this scenario is familiar, you are not alone. This is the central paradox of the modern telecom company: being a massive, powerful entity that is consistently outmaneuvered by smaller, faster players. The problem isn’t a lack of ideas, but the catastrophically slow speed of their execution (Time-to-Market).
The Diagnosis: Why Does the Telecom Ship Move So Slowly?
The delay in the idea-to-market process has four fundamental, systemic causes:
- The Legacy Burden: Telecom companies are built on massive, interconnected infrastructure and billing systems (BSS/OSS) that have been developed over decades. Any new product must be “plugged into” this complex web, turning even a simple change into a months-long project fraught with risk.
- The Waterfall Model of Product Development: Traditionally, products in telecom are created through rigid, sequential phases, much like construction projects. A 200-page business requirements document is written, then handed off to IT, then to testing, then to marketing. By the time the product is launched 18 months later, customer needs and the market environment have already changed radically.
- Silos and Committee-Based Governance: A new product idea must pass through dozens of departmental “filters”: marketing, IT, network operations, legal, finance, and so on. Each department has its own priorities and veto power. This “death by a thousand meetings” paralyzes decision-making and diffuses responsibility.
- A Risk-Averse Culture: Because telecoms manage critical infrastructure, their culture is naturally geared towards avoiding risk. They strive for 100% perfection before launch, which is impossible in the digital world. They fear failure, whereas startups see it as a learning opportunity.
A Sprint, Not a Marathon: Our Model for Accelerating the Idea-to-Market Process
For a telecom to compete in the digital era, cosmetic improvements to existing processes are not enough. A complete transformation of the operating model is required. Our approach is based on three fundamental, interconnected changes:
Step 1 (Organizational Change): From Projects to Products – Creating the Unified Product Team
This is a fundamental shift in mindset. We help companies move away from temporary “projects” and instead create permanent product teams united around a single goal. This team is like a mini-startup within the company. The team is cross-functional and includes a Product Owner (who acts as the product’s mini-CEO), a marketing specialist, a UX/UI designer, and key IT and network engineers. They are 100% dedicated to working together on the success of this one product. This completely eliminates the problem of information hand-offs and delays between departments.
Step 2 (Process Change): Adopting an Agile Delivery Model
This is about changing the engine of the process. Instead of the rigid Waterfall model, the team works with an Agile methodology (such as Scrum). We help them break down the big idea into small, manageable features and work in short, 2-4 week sprints. At the end of each sprint, they deliver a small, working piece of the product. This allows for constant feedback from real users and enables the product to evolve based on real data, not on assumptions made a year ago. We implement the concept of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Instead of building all 20 features at once, what are the 2-3 core features that solve the customer’s main problem? We launch this minimal version to the market, gather data, and then add the features that customers actually need. This drastically reduces risk and accelerates time-to-market.
Step 3 (Technological & Governance Change): Decoupling Systems and Empowering the Team
It’s impossible to be fast if every minor change requires a six-month project to update the legacy billing system. We work with the IT department to create APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). These APIs act as “plugs” that allow the new digital team to access the functionality of core systems (like customer data) without having to modify the entire legacy system. This “decoupling” gives the product team the autonomy to work independently and quickly. At the same time, we work with management to increase the authority of the Product Owner and their team. They are given a budget and a mandate, and they no longer need to go through ten committees to approve a change in a button’s color.
In Conclusion
In the digital era, speed is the new currency. A telecom company no longer has the luxury of operating with analog-era processes. Being slow is no longer safe—today, it is the biggest risk of all. Our role is not just to teach Agile theory, but to execute a complete transformation—realigning your structure, processes, and technological approaches to turn Axen into a powerful product-launching machine that can compete with even the most agile startups.
