Disrupt Yourself Before Someone Else Does
Market leaders survive by challenging and cannibalizing their own products before an upstart does it for them.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 85%
An antidote to the innovator's dilemma for incumbents: because market-share leaders naturally drift toward incremental product strategy, leaders must deliberately challenge and disrupt their own models before a disruptor arrives. The discipline is to notice when the team is getting too comfortable and force a more transformational bet, treating disruption as inevitable rather than optional.
Origin
Shweta Shrivastava frames this explicitly as the classic innovator's dilemma (Clayton Christensen), applied to large companies where she has repeatedly seen and practiced self-disruption. She names Christensen's 'Innovator's Dilemma' as a foundational influence.
Core principles
- 01Large companies drift toward incremental strategy because they lead their market
- 02Disruption by an upstart is inevitable, so pre-empt it
- 03Companies that constantly challenge their own models are the ones that succeed
- 04Leaders must supply the mindset shift: recognize when the team is 'too comfortable'
How to run it
- 1
Diagnose incremental drift
Watch for the sign that product strategy has become incremental because you're the market-share leader — the point where the team is getting too comfortable.
Pro tip Ask 'are we getting too complacent?' as a recurring leadership check, not a one-off.
Watch out Market leadership is exactly the condition that hides the drift; comfort feels like success right up until an upstart appears.
- 2
Decide to disrupt your own model
Deliberately challenge and disrupt your own product capabilities or business model to produce something more transformational for customers, rather than waiting to be disrupted.
- 3
Fund a first-of-its-kind bet
Stand up a genuinely new product in a space the company hasn't entered, staffed and resourced as a real effort, not a side experiment.
Pro tip Put a dedicated PM and team around the new bet so it isn't starved by the core business's incremental roadmap.
In the wild
At Amazon, Shweta was the first PM and built the team around Honeycode, a no-code application development platform — a brand-new space for an infrastructure-focused company and a first-of-its-kind service.
→ A net-new product line in an unfamiliar space; Shweta cites it as one of several times self-disruption played out in her career, reinforcing her as 'a big believer in disrupting yourself before somebody else does.'
Common mistakes
Staying incremental because you're winning
Market leaders get very incremental in strategy and then get disrupted by an upstart; treating current dominance as permanent is the core innovator's-dilemma trap.
Waiting for the threat to appear
By the time an external disruptor is visible, the incumbent is already behind; the whole point is to move before the threat materializes, because it inevitably will.
Is it for you?
Best for
Product leaders and executives at established market-leading companies who need to justify and drive transformational bets against incremental inertia.
Not ideal for
Early-stage startups still searching for product-market fit, where the priority is nailing the core product rather than cannibalizing it.
From the transcript
“you need to disrupt yourself before somebody else does right because it's gonna happen it's inevitable in large companies”
“the large companies tend to be the market share leaders in in their focus areas and so the product team and the product leaders can…”
“in Amazon I launched or I was the first um pm and then I go the team around it uh for a no code application…”
From the episode
Product lessons from Waymo
Shweta Shrivastava (Waymo, Amazon, Cisco)