Launching Bain’s digital product arm Next-Gen Software Solutions (NGSS)

Bain launched the Next-Gen Software Solutions (NGSS) team with just five members: Michael Osbourne, Stephen Dienhart, Michael Ward, Stefan Schulte, and Wayne Boley. They set about devising all the team’s processes from scratch. “We were building the plane whilst flying it,” recalls Michael Osbourne, Vice President and Head of NGSS. 

One of the great benefits of working on a team like this is it offers all the security and benefits of working within Bain’s culture and also a chance to have total ownership of important problems from start to finish. “It was, and continues to be, an alchemy of both worlds, large enterprise and startup,” says Michael Osbourne. 

The NGSS team’s plans and processes began to coalesce as Bain identified their first product, ARC, short for “action, results, and collaboration.” Bain helps its clients utterly transform their businesses. But tracking and managing all those workstreams across an enterprise is difficult. The Transformation Practice, which leads this kind of work, knew this, and partnered with NGSS to begin building ARC to help both Bainies and clients monitor their progress, collaborate, and launch initiatives.

Through this and other projects, the NGSS team arrived at core values they knew would make them successful:

Innovation—Try things that haven’t been done before. 
Customer-centricity—Empathize with the customer and listen deeply. 
Diversity and inclusion—Celebrate the value of a diversity of opinions and backgrounds. 
Product-mindedness—Think in terms of scale from day one. 
Continuously improving—Use everything as an opportunity to become 1% better.

Questions:

• What factors would ensure the NGSS team’s success? 

• What would convince consultants and clients to adopt internal software? 

• How would they get many internal teams to share the best of their knowledge?