Learning From Failure — part 3
When Iteration Fails
This is the final article in our series announcing some changes at Corsair’s. It was an iterative article. And I remain a huge fan of iteration, both in terms of analytics and business development in general. But there is at least one situation in which iteration will fail you…
Iteration is typically a great way to develop a strategy, a business, and a plan. If done with efficiency, it wins hands down and going away. Unfortunately, if iteration builds a maintenance requirement, it creates a form of debt. This should not have surprised me. I am a huge opponent of tech debt. It often occurs during iterative development when efficiency is ignored for expediency. It can be debilitating.
I was on the look out for tech debt. That wasn’t our problem. What surprised me was the relationship debt that grew with each iterative client, student, or partner. It was something that when I operated analytic camps within major corporations — I overcame with trust. But consultants aren’t given that luxury — something I should have realized since even internal groups can be burdened this way when corporations grow or change.
I was thoroughly blindsided.
That hurts. What stings worse is the situation that followed. Once you realize that you are growing this inefficient burden, hope drives you to believe you can scale out of it. Perhaps we could have? But we were never able to achieve it. Iteration and addition only brought greater debt. Each new client only lessened our ability to build new opportunities and sell further deals. There was just too much education, training, and relationship building that required our immediate focus.
As I have noted in the prior articles, this wasn’t all bad. Ultimately, it drove us to innovate a more scalable and efficient concept model. But that only occurred after our existing model began to buckle and collapse from the weight of a growing client list. Exacerbating things, the limited repeat business coming from our “cutting-edge” portfolio often required heavy management despite smaller budgets. This acted to increase the pressure but also drove the innovation.
If you are going to adopt iterative development, keep one eye out for any issues which might create inefficiency in the model. Tech debt, relationship management, or some other complication that could blindside you and steal resources — limiting your ability to scale and further iterate.
Today, Corsair’s is committed to efficient development. It is in line with our bootstrapping strength and an important lesson from our story. We won’t get caught looking the wrong way again. There is no guarantee that our latest strategy will ultimately be successful but analytics is about learning from failure and embracing success. Education can come at scale. It can be iterative and efficient — though only if it is innovative and build on a solid test & learn foundation. We think we are there and that gives us confidence for the future.
If you would like to build your own confidence for a future where analytics helps build your success, check out what we are building now:
And as always — thanks for reading!
