Lean Startup adventures in corporate world
On the second day of Easter, Polish entrepreneur Marcin was tweeting about his delayed flight from Munich to San Francisco. These were three long hours of uncertainty for him on a day which a typical Pole spends with his family. Trying to make it up for the delay, Lufthansa rewarded each of the passengers with a 5 Euro voucher. Marcin wasn’t happy, he just wanted to know, how long the flight would be delayed for.
If the airline was practising Lean Startup methodologies and had done some tests with passengers, it would have known, that they don’t need coffee or a voucher. I learnt that two weeks earlier at the Lean Startup Summit in Amsterdam.
Here in the presentation done by Vincent Tham I heard about Transavia. People working in this airline also assumed that when a flight is delayed, passengers expect some reward. But Transavia tries to practice Lean Startup methodologies and its team decided to make a test. They went to the airport and waited for delayed flights. After finding one, they went to the gate to check if free coffee will please passengers. It didn’t work. All the passengers really wanted was regulary updated info about the flight status. What they especially wanted to know was if the gate will change. So the airline decided to launch additional communication channels like internet messengers.
When Eric Ries’s book “The Lean Startup” was published in 2011 we at Gazeta.pl were one of the first big organizations to adopt it. We read it thoroughly, did some workshops and launched an internal pilot project. Three teams were competing for internal funding and finally we had one application under the development. We launched it, it even became popular in some countries, but ultimately it was a failure. Typical in innovation efforts.
Yes, failure is normal. For me, one of the reasons to go to the conference was a possibility to listen to Benoît Legrand, Chief Innovation Officer from ING Bank. It was because the bank’s story became recently somewhat famous. Reason? Dutch corporation decided to follow Spotify approach to product development and it was covered by McKinsey Quarterly. I followed the story and wanted to listen to Legrand in person. And it was not disappointing.
He won my heart by saing “Being number one on Apple Watch is a good only for the ego of the product owner”. Exactly: usually when you are first on such a plaform none of your users are there.
As an executive responsible for such a huge budget Legrand was very humble. So was his speech. Maybe he is just this kind of man, maybe there is something in the innovation process what makes you become humble. According to his words, with 30 ideas/innovation initiatives typically you will achieve one or maybe two successful products.
Sometimes it takes us half a year to realise 6 months ago we failed — said Legrand. Building innovative products takes many trials and results mostly in errors. — We’re surrounded by people who know. But we don’t know, and we have to figure out what is the source of their knowledge — said Legrand. Such efforts take time and lots of energy, you have to accept this cost. Thats why one of the fundamentals of innovation is strong leadership.
We tend to look at innovation from the perspective of successful ones. Meanwhile, huge failure ratio is the reality behind one of the lean startup fundamental assumptions. Before you start building anything, it is necessary to test if there will be a market for it. You do that by building Minimum Viable Product. Sometimes is only a presentation of a product. Then you try to sell it. If no one wants it, there is no need to build anything.
As everything is connected, I remember, that Marcin Treder’s (Polish startuper from the Munich airport) business UXPin started as an MVP. In the very beginning he was selling paper notebooks to enable UX prototyping. I still have one of them. It was a brilliant way to test the idea. I believe the path one of the best Polish startups went is worth following. The number of people who know this is growing every year. And eventually, every airline in need to survive will have to know the actual needs of passengers waiting for delayed flights..
