I finally legit MVP’d and it really, really worked
I’ve spent years appreciating but throwing a slight side-eye toward the religion of ‘Minimum Viable Product’, or MVP as it’s popularly known to anyone who’s read a blog post about startups in the last few years. (I’ll loosely define MVP here as getting the most barebones but still usable / useful version of your idea of product out the door in its earliest iteration, and seeing if and how people use and like it.) The logic always made total sense, but I cling to perfectionism and really struggle with where to draw the line on the ‘Viable’ part.
But I checked myself, and this summer we lovingly MVP’d Bravely. (Read: we had no money so we really had no option.) I’m so glad we did, because taking an MVP approach has radically transformed how we’re building our business.
A quick summary of what we rolled out: In June of this year we launched a landing page (powered by Squarespace) that offered free phone sessions to anyone who wanted to discuss workplace issues — conflict with bosses, unfulfilled promises of promotions, general job dissatisfaction — with an expert HR professional or coach (we call them “Pros”). We got a few of our smartest friends with impressive HR and coaching backgrounds trained up on the kind of experience we wanted to offer. Then we sent out an email to a few hundred of our friends and former colleagues, posted on social media, and away we went.
The genuine interest and powerful resonance were immediately undoubtable. In addition to our friends and family, we had strangers posting and sharing about Bravely with an intensity of enthusiasm that caught us off guard. We got some slight but compelling organic coverage by a couple of blogs and sites devoted to career advice. And most importantly, we got dozens of session requests right away, all of which came with juicy nuggets of learnings.
We’re self-aware enough (I hope) to recognize that we need a lot more data to decree sweeping truths about how to better resolve workplace issues, but we wanted to share the learnings that have informed how we’ve built:
- The core of our idea works: “We hypothesize that it’s useful and valuable for people to talk to an unbiased coach or human resources professional trained in conflict resolution and effective communication frameworks to get a neutral perspective on issues and get support in creating action plans around those issues.” Check. From our sessions so far, we have an NPS score of 79. People love us!
- We planted seeds of behavior change: Of everyone who had a session this summer, 46% said before Bravely they were thinking they would start looking for a new job. Only 8% said they would have approached their HR team regardless. These initial results were even stronger than we expected in supporting our thesis that our experience would send people forward more proactively and constructively to tackle issues before they spun out of control. Bravely is good for people and good for companies.
- We’re helpful for managers, not just more junior employees: We always envisioned Bravely as a resource for individual contributors or folks relatively early in their career who need to go talk to their bosses or HRBP about something they were anxious about. But 22% of our sessions were with managers preparing for difficult conversations with their direct reports! We had managers who had to let someone go for the first time, and managers needing to give tough feedback but weren’t sure how to frame it in a way that would keep motivation and energy high. Turns out conversations like this are stressful on both sides.
- We could help support more inclusive workplaces: Almost everyone who booked a session this summer was a woman, a person of color, or LGBTQ-identifying. The needs ranged from issues specifically related to identity to more routine issues accompanied by a higher level of intimidation or anxiety. We’re only at the beginning of learning on this front, but the initial experience suggests we can be a powerful resource for diverse employees working for success in the workplace, but that also means we need to think carefully about the diversity and makeup of our Pros.
- The quality of the Pros matters most, but logistics count too: We had some botched operations and scheduling mishaps with some folks, which we still feel bad about. Thankfully, we got it together, and our new app and back-end make the experience so much more seamless. I think we underestimated how much scheduling / rescheduling and communication about schedules would matter, which in retrospect is kind of dumb.
With the data and the insights we’ve collected, we’ve developed a more robust product and are now actively onboarding our first set of company partners offering Bravely to their teams. We’re excited to progress further to the next wave of learning.
Thanks, MVP! We owe you one.
