Prototyping Strategy
Last week the COO (Chief Operating Officer) from one of our clients started the meeting by providing us with feedback on work we’d delivered a week earlier. In two sentences he perfectly captured the value proposition we’ve been crafting for almost three years but he did one other thing too — he explained the value of prototyping strategy from a clients perspective perfectly.
“You understood our problems in great depth and across all areas of the business. Your insights were born out of a real world understanding of our challenges and thus our customer’s frustrations. But what made the real difference is your solution wasn’t just a high value, strategic vision you’d also imagined, and delivered, proposed solutions for that strategy.”
We call those proposed solutions, product candidates, and they are born out of a process of prototyping ideas and strategies to test their validity in the real world. This process comes from a mindset of marginal gains or a view that even when we have developed a strategy it isn’t right until it’s been tested.
By using prototypes at every stage of a project we’re able to test our ideas within days of having them, gather data, gain insights, improve the prototype, test again, gain more insights and continue improving until we are ready to present a product candidate. Through the process of testing and iterating the strategy also becomes much clearer, it develops and is moulded by our findings.
“Prototyping is a tool for progressively shortening the odds of a course of action and minimising the costs along the way.” — HBR
Once we present the product candidate this isn’t the end either, it represents a solution we feel should go to market for further pilot testing with live customers. In short, design never stops. The roll out is just the beginning. We launch and then constantly gather data, share it, discuss options for improvements, moving forwards and adapt.
It’s about solving big problems by breaking them down into smaller parts and making decisions based on evidence not feeling. In this particular case the problem was big, complex, changing and for a global business. By breaking the project down into smaller parts we were able to quickly test new solutions. We failed more but we also learned more and crucially we did so more quickly than the competition.
“It is better to think of your strategy as not set in stone but rather as the most recent prototype being tested by the latest marketplace experience.” — Roger L. Martin
When first formed any strategy is always conceptual but companies become wedded to them. Maybe it’s because they’re outlined in long documents, decks and grand plans that a fixed mindset develops around them. Leadership becomes convinced they’ve created the best plan and now all that is lacking is execution. They couldn’t be further from the truth. Only in the execution will you start to learn. Before contact with the world you are working in a closed loop. A vacuum devoid of the one crucial element of innovation — feedback. Clear feedback is the cornerstone of improvement. Without it you’re guessing and likely not improving at all.
“I realised early on that having a grand strategy was futile on it’s own. You also have to look at the smaller level. Figure out what is working and what isn’t. Each step maybe small, but the aggregation can be huge.” — Sir David Brailsford — Team Sky
For us grand visions and planning without tangible deliverables is tantamount to talk minus action…it equals sh*t.
By far the most effective part of prototyping strategy is how it bridges the gap between creativity and implementation. It allows you to see how the strategy could work in day-to-day life. It shows specifically a solution to a problem you have. It isn’t fanciful, often it isn’t visionary, but it does solve a problem in the here and now while providing a guide for what the future will look like.
So the next time you are developing a strategy for your business think about how you could prototype it quickly and cheaply. What elements of it do you need to test to validate your hypothesis? What feedback do you need in order to make more informed decisions? By asking these questions during the design phase you will develop, test and finally implement ideas that will have, over time, an enormously positive effect on your business and customers.
Creativity not guided by a feedback mechanism is little more than white noise. Success is a complex interplay between creativity and measurement. The two operating together. — Matthew Syed — Black Box Thinking.
Reading that influenced this post: