Speed counts
“To suffer the penalty of too much haste, which is too little speed.” Plato
Agility wins, it’s as simple as that. Whether you’re iterating towards success or failure, the speed at which a company can do either will define its future.
Fast failures are happy failures, they allow you to fix problems before they become disastrous, and successes, well, successes usually means the company grows.
Here’s an example for you:
The graph above shows the cumulative number of consumer facing products launched between 2000 and 2010 by Google and Yahoo.
Here’s the same graph with both companies revenue tracked along side their consumer facing product launches:
Even with Yahoo’s 2 year head start Google’s revenue performance shows us that speed of iteration will trump an early mover advantage.
Done, is better than perfect.
Google launched 16 new consumer facing products from 2000–2010, but they also discontinued 8 consumer products during that same period, Yahoo on the other hand, only discontinued 2.
Testing and shipping improvements in process, technology, or skillsets is now a process that is critical to the survival of your business. Gone are the days when a potential business case would be scoped, examined, kicked-up to the C-Suite, costed, approved and then actioned for development. Your customers and more importantly, your competitors, won’t wait around for you to remove all of the potential risks of launching new products or services.
So, how can you stay agile, test new channels or products without committing to a future that might not be right for your teams or your business?
Use pay-as-you-go distributed teams.
I currently head-up the team at Distributed, where we facilitate growth by providing managed distributed teams for businesses to test new channels, products or services, in hard-to-hire-for or expensive specialisms.
From SEO, to chatbots and artificial intelligence, we’ve helped our customers grow their businesses and test areas of opportunity at minimal risk to their bottom line, their culture or their existing teams. More often than not, we uncover new revenue streams for them that allow them to build permanent teams around these new services or products, and grow their business.
If you’d like to hear more about Distributed, please get in touch, we’re always available to help.
#recommendedreading
In my opinion this is one of the best war books ever written. Michael Herr, wrote about the Vietnam War for Esquire magazine, gathered his years of notes from his front-line reporting and turned them into this book which was published in 1977.
