Introduction to Lean Content

How the Lean Startup can help us produce better content for less.

Tom Hewitson

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This is an adaptation of a talk I gave on 02/06/2014 at the London Agile Content meetup. Since then I have incorporated ideas and thoughts from other content strategists I’ve been speaking to who are interested in the idea. If you are in content or content strategy and would like to connect you can find me on linkedin.

Introduction

I’ve been working in digital content for the last eight years for several major brands including Lonely Planet and the Telegraph. I now run a digital agency called Lucid Media that works with large and small clients looking to bring data based rigour to their content creation process.

During this time, the key thing I’ve learned is that the secret to creating great content is to start with those you’re making it for. To paraphrase the renowned business thinker Peter Drucker — the core purpose of a publisher is to create an audience. And, that is where the Lean Startup comes in.

For those that don’t know, The Lean Startup is a book / manifesto outlining a set of techniques and processes that allow early stage businesses to rapidly learn about their customers and create popular and profitable products with little prior market information to guide them.

The key to this is for the business carry out a series of experiments both on the market and its internal processes using an iterative build, measure, learn loop until a formula that works and can be scaled is found.

I believe we can use this same technique to help us create better content for less. I also believe that this iterative approach comes quite naturally to most writers and is simple to integrate into the content creation process. After all, what is sending a first, second (and often in my case third) drafts to an editor for comments if not an iterative process?

Making Lean work for content

The trick to adapting the build, measure, learn process to content creation is to eliminate poorly resonating options as quickly as possible. Where a development team may seek to test one hypothesis at a time you should be testing hundreds. Spread yourself thin, searching for that spark of a runaway hit and only invest as success becomes inevitable.

The key to being able to field that many runners at once is to make the cost of each of these as small as possible. In the world of the Lean Startup this is known as creating a Minimum Viable Product and when it comes to content we can go even further.

Lean Content is about putting the audience first. Just like in the car factories where Lean was conceived, anything you put energy into that doesn’t provide the audience with additional value is considered waste.

I’m not advocating putting out rubbish, far from it. Content is not viable if it damages your brand. Fact checking, spelling and grammar are all still essential. What I’m talking about is reducing the scope of your content rather than the quality.

In many cases, the cheapest way of learning whether a piece of content will resonate with your audience is simply to share something similar that already exists. If curation can give you the same learnings as creation, Lean Content dictates you must try it first.

Luckily for us, even if you do need to invest in creating something to make the desired learning, most digital content production comes in fairly small batch sizes — an article, a podcast, a photo gallery. Even if you need a few to fully validate your hypothesis you can start collecting data almost straight away allowing you to check you’re not on the wrong track much earlier on.

However, if you’re going to make these learnings you need to be ready to act on them. Continuous experimentation and rapid response are essential to Lean Content and a standard editorial calendar simply can’t handle it.

Yes, every business will have some PR and marketing requirements that have to be delivered in a certain way by a set date and for those a pre-planned approach will have to suffice. For the rest, I say ditch the admin and focus on picking winners instead.

But, just because we’re not going to pre-plan doesn’t mean we can do what we like. If you’re not holding yourself accountable through actionable data you’re not creating Lean Content. You need to know if something works before you can invest.

While Lean Content is inspired by the scientific method, when it comes to data we simply don’t have the time to wait for the thousands of pageviews needed for a statistically significant result. You need to react early and react fast, even if you run the risk of occasionally being wrong.

This is where having multiple experiments running in parallel also acts as an insurance, even if you make a mistake on this particular iteration, in aggregate you will make the right call. Also, the more successful an item of content becomes, the more data you will have thereby lowering the chance of making a bad call.

One thing you can do, though, is to use qualitative data to bolster your numbers and help you make a decision. I like to use a mechanical turk style system to collect feedback from 10 random strangers on everything I write to complement more traditional stats.

I find a quick way of combining all this data into something useful is to keep your hypothesis and validation requirements in an experiment grid (here’s an official one and here’s the one I made for myself — feel free to copy it) that you can then fill out once each experiment is complete. This both keeps you honest and doubles as your documentation.

If your experiment confirms you’re on the right track that’s great, get ready for another ride round the build, measure, learn loop. If not, then it’s time to pivot! In Lean Content that simply means leaving the published content as is and moving onto something new. There’s no sense in chucking away something that may still provide someone with some value unless there are brand implications.

Using the pivot and persevere method we can quickly sort the also-rans from those with potential. By focussing your time and effort on the items of content that are serious contenders for a big hit you’ll have the resource and energy needed to turn a few into runaway successes.

Want to know more? Say hi @tomhewitson on Twitter or at www.tomhewitson.com

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Tom Hewitson

Conversation designer. Founder of @labworksio + creator of @voice_arcade 🏴‍☠️🇪🇺🏳️‍🌈 www.tomhewitson.com