Why the secret to breakthrough innovation is experimentation
Since launching RIVAL in 2018, Design Director Brendan Kearns has made it his mission to bring together a team of first-class designers to help organisations adopt a culture of experimentation.
Drawing from his experience as a Lead Designer at companies like Google and Twitter, RIVAL brings a unique perspective outside the walls of big tech. How? I sat down with Brendan to learn about the secret ingredients of experimentation, the role of Beta Communities, and how RIVAL implements rituals and design processes inside organisations that are ready to invest in innovation.
Hi Brendan. How you would describe your role at RIVAL?
Our ambition is to create the perfect environment for great minds to come together to solve big problems using design and technology. My role is to bring this to life through a first-class team of thinkers and doers as they tackle the big questions that our clients are facing. I’m also a designer by trade, so my day to day is filled with perspectives and strategic leadership of our projects.
And, what does RIVAL do?
We’re a design and innovation studio born out of big tech. The simplest way of explaining what that means is that we help businesses redefine themselves for the digital age. For us, this means thinking and working experimentally at every level of an organisation — so that they can create the products and services that people love to use everyday.
In any given week, we might be prototyping a new product for a tech company, doing deep research with customers, or running a workshop with corporate leaders on how to be more experimental as a business. What we bring to the table in all of our projects is a proven-history of innovating inside well-known startups, corporates, and big tech companies — not to mention a process that embeds real customers from day one.
Inside The Studio
A small but mighty studio born out of big tech. What’s the story?
RIVAL was born as an idea during my time at Google. As a senior designer working across multiple teams in both the UK and Silicon Valley, I had a unique perspective on what drives some of the most successful products in the world. Spending time and working on products with hundreds of millions of users brings an experience of design and innovation at scale that, ultimately, forces you to think differently. In previous roles, I’ve set up and ran labs that further cemented my view on the power of embedding real customers into any design or product development process from day one.
A lot of organisations still operate on principles that are at odds with what it takes to be a successful business in the 21st century. And, I’m not just talking about companies whose long-term stability was upended by the internet. I’m referring to the disconnect between emerging trends, customer needs, and the decisions made about how to evolve into a digitally-led business.
I wanted to bring all of this to life–outside the walls of big tech. With that, we’ve made it our mission to close the gap between companies and the customers they serve. Partnering with them to build the products and services that people love to use everyday.
How has your experience shaped the studio’s approach?
Engaging with real customers goes way beyond surveys and customer panels. To build products and services people want to use everyday, gathering honest insights from an audience plays a huge role in that. At RIVAL, we call them Beta Communities, whereby we engage with these communities for continuous feedback on everything we are helping to build. From discovery research, testing prototypes, and even access to early MVPs. Customer panels are dead. Long live Beta Communities.
RIVAL’s Approach
You differentiate the studio’s approach as Distances and Sprints. Could you talk us through what they mean?
A lot of agencies talk about the magic of their process. But, in reality they’re all pretty much the same. When we started, we asked a different question: How long does it take to understand and solve problems well? We realised that the kinds of questions we’re regularly asked to solve live on a spectrum.
On one end they’re tactical, e.g. How can we get more people to do X? What is the best way to do Y? On the other end they’re broad and strategic. They delve into more long-term challenges that our clients are having, e.g. What are the biggest opportunities for us in the next few years? How do we experiment with what that might look like for us as a business?
Sprints are our way of spinning up a team to answer tactical questions, quickly. Distances are longer-term partnerships where our team is embedded with a client to focus on longer term ambitions and the challenges they’re facing. Both are brilliant in that they’re fit for purpose for the questions that they’ve been designed to solve. The key is to know which one to apply — which we’re very good at doing 😄.
The notion of continuous experimentation feels like a philosophy of RIVAL’s. Why is it important for organisations to foster a culture/mindset of experimentation?
When I was at companies like Google and Twitter, a new product or feature wouldn’t get into the hands of customers without first going through a rigorous process of experimentation. This meant that even the wildest ideas could be tested with real people, quickly, in a controlled way. Only when we had enough understanding and confidence about how it was received by customers would an idea then begin to be scaled around the world.
Even with the spotlight on tech giants over the past decade, the one thing organisations hoping to innovate ignore is the culture of experimentation. Instead of a commitment to keep a watchful eye on emerging tech, potential new business models, and changes in customer behaviour, a lot of organisations often assign the same criteria to emerging ideas that they do to projects and products that are established, and miss out on the potential of ingenuity in nascent stages.
The most important ingredient to successful innovation isn’t in the moment of initial creation. It’s the speed of iteration. If you obsess on shortening the time between iterations, then you’ll be learning 10x faster than even your fiercest competitors.
I like what Professor Rita McGrath from Columbia Business School says…
We used to think of the competitive environment as one of punctuated equilibrium, where there were long periods of stability between disruptions.
Now the disruptions are coming closer and closer together. The competitive environment is in perpetual motion.
Continuous experimentation is how modern companies stay in perpetual motion.
Creating new digital products and services usually equates to building new process and capabilities inside the organisation to help deliver them. Where does RIVAL come in play here?
100%. Great products need great teams. Even the best projects will starve to death if the organisation surrounding them isn’t up to the job. We’ve seen too many examples of a brilliant executions failing because the team were missing the capabilities it needed to be successful, or worse, the people responsible moved on to something else.
Building design and innovation capabilities is something that we do naturally with our clients. At one early-stage company, we’ve even introduced the right mix of rituals that brings their teams together, as well as built an index for how it can grow its design organisation.
I’d go so far and say that we have two kinds of engagements at RIVAL:
- Projects: Designing and scaling new products and services.
- Capabilities: Helping leaders build the creative muscles they need to become a more innovative company.
What are your main insights from working with teams and organisations when helping them to evolve?
Every organisation is unique but there’s a common belief, usually at senior levels of larger incumbents, where technology is treated like a panacea to every problem. The risk is that when you idolise large-scale transformation programmes that centre around tech, you may just be investing in the very thing that’s getting in the way of your success.
We’re not against large-scale transformation. We just know how much better they are done from an ambition that is people-led, not tech-led. Our work with the transformation team at Google says it best:
The most successful companies will be — and always have been — the ones that put people at the heart of what they do. Two groups of people specifically: their employees and their customers.
The paradox of digital transformation is this: the more a company focuses on technology, the less likely it is to benefit from it.
Working with RIVAL
In terms of projects, what have been the highlights from the past year?
I’m proud that we’ve had a relationship with Google from the moment we started RIVAL. Even before the pandemic, we were helping them develop programs for using Moonshot Thinking and rapid prototyping to accelerate digital transformation inside its clients businesses. Since then, we’ve worked on projects with teams in the UK, Spain, Switzerland, Romania, and South Africa.
We also continue to work with ambitious startups and early-stage companies. One of our clients is an Accel-backed software company that’s making it easier for people to build their own apps for work. Not only are they a brilliant team, but they’re working on problems that have the potential to impact millions of people around the world, everyday.
What’s the biggest challenge/opportunity [of the digital age] you foresee for businesses over the next 5 years?
The biggest challenge for companies big and small over the next five years is going to be centred around the continued rise in XaaS (Anything as a Service) tools, and the speed in which competitors can build and launch better, more customer-centric products in less time than ever before.
Challengers will continue to spin up new propositions in once-lucrative industries without the need for large swaths of infrastructure. Banking-as-a-service and embedded finance are perfect examples of this. On top of that, the greater the access for challengers to spin up rival offerings and low switching costs for consumers is likely to mean that competition isn’t going to be won by launching feature-packed products and services all at once.
It will be firms that combine speed and iteration with a deep understanding of their customers that win the day. This is why design and customer experience is going to be even more critical for brands to solve problems for people in a more meaningful and personalised way. And where brilliant tech is just a tool we use to get there, not an objective in and of itself.
That sounds like the perfect place to end it, thanks Brendan!
RIVAL is a strategic design studio born out of big tech based in East London, UK. We help shape and build products that people love. Get in touch with Brendan to find out what RIVAL can do for you: brendan@studiorival.com
