Slow To Fast: Making Your Org Move Like a Startup

The fastest company wins

This article is co-written with Dennis Hettema

Digital Transformation. Two words that have been on pretty much everyone’s lips during the last few years. We’ve heard the stories of successful startups and their way of disrupting markets, and also stories of century-old companies failing to innovate and fading away. But what is Digital Transformation? What is the essence? Digital Transformation in its purest form is about one word: speed, making your organization faster, nimbler, and more responsive.

And, how do you achieve speed? By applying a three-step process addressing the focus, alignment and rhythm of your business.

First, let’s talk about speed

Our reality is that we are living in inspiring and yet difficult times. Startups and pure digital companies are challenging traditional industries. AirBnB is challenging the way hotels are run, Uber is turning the transportation industry upside down, Netflix is changing the way we consume media and Amazon how we buy products, the list goes on.

So, what is the secret of these companies’ success?

What is their competitive advantage? The fundamental aspect of their success is their speed. They have the velocity to rapidly adapt and to quickly take products to market. Since they are young organizations, they have the benefit of not having legacy systems and complex bureaucracies, like their older traditional counterparts.

“I’ve long believed that speed is the ultimate weapon in business. All else being equal, the fastest company in any market will win.”
— Dave Girouard

And, what is speed?

Speed in a start-up sense is not about working longer hours and having more stress. Speed is about having an operating model that enables a quicker loop to build, measure and learn, a loop that should constantly get faster and faster.

But, how do I get my organization to become faster? We’re not a fancy start-up.

Achieving greater speed is about instilling a culture where everyone has a common focus, an alignment on treating design as a team sport, and the same steady rhythm.

Step 1: Focus

Focus is about having a common view of what the most important products or features are that you should ship to your customers.

If you work in a product-centric environment, thousands and thousands of product ideas flow through your organization, some of which get added to the backlog. The challenge is not about coming up with ideas. The challenge is to prioritize them and decide which ones should be shipped first, second and so on. If you don’t have focus, and a clear way of prioritizing ideas, it will cause a lot of debate and noise in product management, ultimately slowing you down.

So, how do you prioritize?

The simple answer: to compare apples to apples, defining a system where you can clearly visualize and compare features next to each other. This simple visual model will give everyone within your organization the power to say: “Hey, this doesn’t fit.” Without a tool like this, office politics tend to take precedence over common sense on what to ship next.

An excellent example of such a comparison can be found in “Intercom on Product Management”.

This tool works well for the aspect of feature usage, but that is only one part of the equation.

To achieve focus in your business, you need to create a similar system where you score features on a scale. To do so, analyze the metrics that are most important to your organization. Maybe it’s user growth? Maybe it’s user retention? Tweak and learn until you have a model that can help you triage the onslaught of opportunities coming your way.

Here’s an example:

Axis one:

• User growth (1–6)
• User retention (1–6)

Axis two:

• Technical complexity (1–6)
• Strategic value (1–6)

The model will look different for every organization. When you find yours, focus will be within your grasp. You can now move on to the next course of action: aligning the way you work and treating design as a team sport.

Step 2: Alignment

You have now addressed what you are doing and why you are doing it through prioritization. The next step is to align on how you are doing it.

The reality is that the process of going from idea to shipped product might not always be linear. It might actually look like this:

Here’s a story of what can happen…

A customer service representative comes up with a brilliant idea on how to address a customer problem. The representative takes the idea to a Product Owner who analyzes if it can be realized. It can. The Product Owner thereafter goes to a Product Designer who puts a sketch together. However, when presenting the sketch to a developer, the developer brings up many points around the complexity of the idea.

The designer goes back to the drawing board. After a few more sketches, the design gets coded and is ready to be tested. A Quality Assurance engineer starts testing the feature and discovers quite a few issues about things that weren’t incorporated in the initial design. Additionally, Legal and Operations give input at a late stage on the risks, as well as, the operational inefficiencies with the feature. Back to the drawing board again…

How can you prevent this type of story from happening?

The answer is to work together and to treat design as a team sport. A method to do so is called a Design Sprint.

A Design Sprint is a one-week workshop series where a cross-functional team works closely and designs together. In one week, the group produces an interactive prototype that gets tested on customers. Essentially, in one week’s time, you go from an idea to a validated product.

How do you run a Design Sprint?

As a soccer team has strikers, mid-fielders, defenders and a goalkeeper, organize Design Sprints with Primary, Support, Expert, and Extended teams. These individuals should be brought into the sprint at various points during the week, each one bringing their flavor and expertise to the mix.

Here’s an example of a roster.

Applying this way of working will enable you to create a well-rounded design that will have a limited amount of friction when flowing through to a shipped product.

It’s now time to pick up the rhythm.

Step 3: Rhythm

Like a drummer plays a steady beat with precision, an organization needs to have a stable and predictive rhythm in how it operates. This is a challenge to mature organizations, or as John Maeda calls them: end-ups. Their rhythm may be disrupted due to unplanned work that can be caused by legacy systems, cumbersome processes and complex structures. Unplanned work is quite frankly the enemy of real work. Unplanned work is essentially work that comes in from the sidelines, work that disrupts the rhythm.

The number one enemy of real work is unplanned work

How can I decrease the amount of unplanned work?

You can apply the Theory of Constraints. It might sound like fancy management talk, but the theory is very simple. It’s about isolating Constraints, or bottlenecks, in the system from going from an idea to a shipped product.

Internet companies are not very different from traditional manufacturing companies. Internet companies produce code, and manufacturers produce physical products, but the process is the same: going from idea to shipped product.

To exemplify the Theory of Constraints, let’s tell a story about a small manufacturer of leather suitcases.

In simple terms, this company has three main stations in their process of going from idea to shipped product: Purchasing, Stitching and Shipping.

In the Stitching station, they have two very skilled suitcase makers. They work hard, but they never finish all the leather that’s available, since there are only two of them.

The Purchasing department, on the other hand, is very frustrated by another reason. They are working with an old purchasing system. People in the Purchasing department are quitting because it’s so frustrating to work with the software.

As a result, the Head of Purchasing goes to top management and asks for a budget to invest in a new system. Should they? The answer is of course: “No”. Having a better way of purchasing will cause more leather to be available for stitching, but that will not change the overall output of products. The Stitching station is the Constraint.

How do I apply this in my work?

By fixing Constraints. You start with the first one, the biggest one, and then you move on to the next. You can do so in your business by gathering your team and discussing what is causing unplanned work. For instance, use the 5 Whys to get to the root cause.

Once you have fixed the biggest Constraints, as a result, the pace will start to pick up. But, it’s not over. It’s time to do it again. Fix another Constraint. Move on to the next, continuously tweaking, perfecting your process to build faster, to measure faster, and to learn faster.

Summary

In order for your organization to run faster and to be more responsive like a startup, apply a three-step process:

1. Focus: focus on the right things for your customers and your business

2. Alignment: work together and treat design as a team sport

3. Rhythm: create a steady beat within your organization

Do all of the above and your customers will thank you.

The article is supporting material for a 2016 SXSW Panelpicker submission.