Turning the Cruise Ship: 5 Lessons Learned in Corporate Innovation
Part III — Build, Measure, Learn
I spent a lot more of my life then I would have ever expected focused on the ins and outs of shaving, with over 8 years in global brand management for Gillette. The most unique experience was piloting a “Front End Innovation” role for Gillette’s global innovation program. Over the next few posts, I’ll focus on my key lessons learned in trying to ‘Turn the Cruise Ship’ as a corporate innovator. Spoiler alert — none of these will feel like rocket science, but hopefully they will help connect with your own innovation challenges.
Find Part 1 of this series here, and Part 2 here.
Lesson #3 — Build, Measure, Learn
There’s a very popular quote from Steve Blank which says: ‘no business plan survives first contact with customers.’ However, I like the way Mike Tyson said it better: ‘Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.’ Wise words, Mike.
But so much of big corporate work often relies on ‘qualification’ vs. ‘validation. Let me give an example – have you ever done concept testing for a new idea? The kind where you agonize internally for weeks on assembling a collection of words into a few paragraphs on a page. You have multiple written iterations of a benefit, a reason to believe, etc. You cram all these words onto a page, slap a picture and price onto it, and then go sit behind one way glass in focus groups for a week.
In between all the M&Ms and the snarky comments, your ears perk up when you hear your consumers say what you wanted to hear and you scribble a note. Then you debrief at the end of the day or week, and everyone agrees that articulation #27xyz of the benefit statement is ‘the one’. You proceed to use a ‘predictive’ quantitivate test and eventually get a scorecard showing everything is smiles and rainbows, and so you scale up and go to launch. Then a couple of months after the product launches you wonder why the results in market look nothing like the ‘predictive’ tests.
The big miss here is that you completely miss the boat on real consumers experiencing your actual value prop (or a prototype version) until it’s too late. The way to avoid this is to take the most basic concept of Lean Startup methodology — the ‘lean loop.’ There is a host of literature on this, but fundamentally it’s about embracing a ‘build/measure/learn’ philosophy. Accelerating customer first contact with prototypes or minimum viable products as quickly as possible, with clear experimental hypotheses, that drive actionable results based on the learning.
For the Gillette project, we went all in on this. Our ideation & concepting work was all done visually (ten words or less on a page), with a designer on hand to mock up new A/B/C versions of our visual ideas on the fly. Our goal was to try and think execution first (what the consumer would actually see), vs. agonize over a bunch of words (a strategy) on a page that wasn’t reflective of the end experience.
We embraced a new research supplier to help augment our traditional testing methodology with new more iterative approaches (it was like the Spotify of concept testing — iterating on multiple variables in real time to allow consumers to iterate to their ideal concept). So instead of testing 10 or 12 concepts, we had access to thousands of unique ideas all built together based on immediate input from the end user.
We would also physically prototype products on a weekly basis — starting with basic popsicle stick & glue style models, quickly fleshing into fancier plastics and shaveable options. We created RRPs (rapid response panels) of 5–8 guys that represented our target market and would give them prototypes to shave with and then get direct feedback on the overall experience. This was immensely helpful — for example one of our ingoing assumptions was to deliver a product feature that would be highly relevant for a specifc user type. We created the prototypes and put it into their hands. Not a single one noticed or used the new feature, even when we pointed it out. But we noticed they kept going over to another unfinished prototype and picking it up, because they really liked the unique material it was made from. This led to the creation of a totally different product which took our overall idea to a new level.
So, Lesson #3 = build, measure, learn. Sounds very much like common sense, right? Getting first hand understanding of what your customer actually thinks of your product? This is how startups live and breathe everyday. But, in the corporate world this is HARD. Not just executing the build/measure/learn approach, but convincing all the internal stakeholders what to do with the data generated from these ‘unconventional means.’ More on how to approach this in Lesson #4, coming soon!
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Do you want to continue the conversation? Email me at gdubejsky@marsdd.com or follow me on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Medium.
