An Agile Coach making himself accountable — by baking dog treats!
2 months ago I quit my job as an Agile Coach to set up BrewBix, a sustainable dog treat brand that upcycles the by-products of brewing beer. I felt the pressure to put into practice what I had been preaching for the last 7 years. So how am I doing? How agile can a dog biscuit company be? I’d spent my career coaching software teams, so how could I translate this to a physical product?
I’ve written before about how we need to be agile in order to navigate uncertainty. Eric Ries, author of “The Lean Startup” talks a lot about how a startup is an environment of “extreme uncertainty”. Hence, the agile mindset is appropriate (there is a lot of overlap between “Agile” and “Lean”).
A traditional approach would have us planning/designing the perfect product, production capability, brand, customer journey, distribution method, all ready for the big marketing launch.
However, this is incredibly risky when there is a lot of uncertainty, and the big bang release can easily lead to a big flop. So instead of trying to create the perfect thing up front, we work out what our biggest uncertainties are. We then try to create something that tests our biggest uncertainties (Eric Ries calls this the “Minimum Viable Product”). This either allows us to be confident that the business is not going to be a flop, or gives us the chance to get out early if we find out that it is!
Riskiest Assumptions
The first steps involve:
- Work out all your biggest risks
- Decide which is the biggest
- Create an MVP to test that out
So I did just that.
When working out your riskiest assumptions, it is useful to map them on a matrix, with one axis showing how likely the assumption is to impact your project, and the other axis showing how much you already know about this risk. See my version (taken a few weeks in).
It’s most important to test those in the top right quadrant — the ones with high impact, but little is known about them. As you test them, you learn about them, and so they move to the left (more is known). They might still be high impact, but hopefully you have learnt that this impact is positive!
First MVP
The key thing to test was whether dogs would like them (this started in the very top right). How could I create something to test this? Easy — we make some ourselves!
I formulated a recipe after researching online. Our priorities were to ensure we used natural ingredients, ideally as few as possible, and with a view to make it scalable. We ended up with just 4 plant-based ingredients. After some hours of mixing, rolling, cutting and baking, I shipped off the first home-baked batch to our dog-owning buddies for the first phase of testing.
Fast-forward
The result? The dogs liked them! Even some really fussy ones. Great news — no need to abort yet!
So I started working through the other assumptions. Without going into too much boring detail, I found a dog biscuit manufacturer who was interested in working with us, and they helped remove any regulatory concerns etc. It cleared out all the riskiest assumptions, and that was the moment I quit my job.
Second MVP
I still had a lot of unknowns. Such as:
- How are we going to get the ingredients to the manufacturer?
- How are we going to package the product? What material, size, shape?
- What price is appropriate?
- Where are we going to store the finished product?
- How are we going to find people to sell to?
- How are we going to distribute it?
Once again, the traditional approach would be to spend a lot of time planning, designing, doing focus groups etc, etc. But no matter how much planning and thinking you do, you don’t know whether you are right until you put it in front of a customer and they decide to buy it.
Hence, the agile / lean approach is to find the quickest way to put something in front of a customer to see if they buy, and whether they like it. Less planning, more doing. So that’s what I did.
I needed to find quick answers to the above questions. Here were the quickest viable ones:
- I drove the ingredients to the manufacturer in a ZipCar
- I found some brown recyclable pouches online, and stamped a BrewBix logo on the front (with some design help from Ollie Tarbuck, thanks!)
- I’ve priced it somewhere in the middle of other dog biscuits
- We are selling our sofa bed to make space to store the biscuits in our flat!
- We are launching on Amazon
- We are set up with Royal Mail Business “Click and Drop” — daily trips to the post office! Well, I hope…
It’s 2 months to the day that I quit my job, and we are about to launch a product on Amazon.
I’m pretty happy that this is a fair effort at getting something to market quickly in order to test our concept. We’ve learnt loads just getting it this far, and hopefully we will soon be getting some extremely valuable feedback from real customers.
On top of that, we’ve so far spent very little money, and we are hopefully about to start getting a bit of revenue. If we find out that this just isn’t viable, we can walk away without having thrown all our savings and the kitchen sink at it..
This is the benefit of the lean / agile approach. You learn quickly, you minimise risk, and you speed up the return on investment.
If you would like to continue to follow our progress, please do so on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook, or sign up to our mailing list. And don’t forget to share with any dog owners that you know!
Cheers!
If you enjoyed reading please give some 👏 and/or leave a comment. For more stories like this check out my publication, The Agile Mindset.
