Scaling Rapid Experimentation: From Pilot to Company-Wide Adoption
You know that scaling Innovation is hard! Everyone is excited for a few weeks until they realise innovation needs all the usual people, process, resources and focus to succeed.
After twelve months of working with enterprise clients to revamp their innovation process, here are 16 lessons to elevate your innovation to the next level.
Running Experiments with Customers
First, it's crucial for team members to run experiments directly with customers. This not only builds trust in the process but also reveals insights that challenge preconceived notions about product success. Engaging with customers early on can be eye-opening, both positively and negatively.
Streamlining Risk and Legal Approvals
Next, streamline the risk and legal approvals for experiments. We collaborated with the risk and legal teams to create a lightweight process that ensures safe and efficient experimentation. This has been immensely beneficial, making risk management a non-issue.
Collaborating with Experiment Enablers
It's also important to work closely with experiment enablers like the CRM team. They play a key role in reaching customers through various channels such as messaging, banners, and newsletters. Their understanding and involvement are vital for the success of your experiments.
Integrating Innovation into the Business
Innovation should be integrated into the business, not treated as a side project. It's essential to have the right people—those who are well-connected within the organisation and have an open mindset to challenge the status quo safely and effectively.
The Importance of a Supportive Process
There are two schools of thought on experimentation: one believes in relying solely on amazing people, while the other emphasises the need for a supportive process. I advocate for the latter. Consistency in experimentation is hard to maintain without a robust process. Over the past year, we've seen fluctuations in our experiment velocity, but by sticking to regular check-ins, experiment and pretotype design sessions, and Lean Canvas workshops, we've achieved remarkable results.
High Engagement Levels
One pleasant surprise has been the high engagement levels. In an organisation with hundreds of thousands of employees, we've consistently had 18 to 20 people join our weekly calls for over a year. This shows a natural passion and commitment to innovation within the team.
Embedding Pretotyping
Initially, we focused heavily on embedding pretotyping into everyone's mindset. This approach paid off as the organisation moved beyond discussing processes to prioritising high-quality, aligned ideas. This shift has been crucial in ensuring that we work on the right things and stay on message.
Prioritising Ideas
We established a robust idea prioritisation process to work out what's really worth exploring. Deciding what to ideas to test is critical to get the most value from limited resources.
Leadership Support and Integration
With constant organisational changes, we've had strong leadership support to double down on innovation and back the team. We embedded innovation into the Product Management Framework because running experiments and testing things is great, but it's crucial to map them against an opportunity canvas upfront and integrate them into the backlog. This approach has been effective, systematising the process so product teams can take ownership.
Software for Innovation
Our software, Rapidly, has been instrumental in this process. It allows us to scale and maintain a single source of truth for the entire idea backlog. Rapidly serves as the key repository for all ideas, helping us decide whether to experiment on them, stop them or move them to the product backlog. This has enabled us to scale innovation across the organisation and let product and technology teams take ownership.
Creating a Consistent Language
Creating a consistent language around innovation has also been vital. Defining terms like "experiment," "innovation," "experiment velocity," "pass," and "fail" has been important. We've trained hundreds of people, ensuring they understand the methodology, approach, and its usefulness.
Areas for Improvement
What can we improve? Our communication wasn't up to scratch. We've learned that there's so much noise in an organisation around product launches, results, and strategy that we need to over-communicate about innovation. It's crucial to share successes, approaches, and the value to the teams on the ground, as they are the ones executing and benefiting from these experiments.
Documenting Learnings and Closing the Loop
We've made sure to document our learnings and show how experimentation fits into the value for product teams. We've also improved tracking ideas from validation through to completion. There's no point in validating ideas if you don't close the loop from idea to execution.
Ongoing Challenges
Resource contention is an ongoing challenge, especially with digital teams, project management, technology, CRM, marketing, and risk. Accessing these resources is part of how we do innovation.
Focus on Velocity
A key message is that we're not just running experiments for the sake of it. The goal is to create velocity—speed from idea to validation or stopping the idea. How fast this happens and gets to the backlog is a crucial metric, as it helps us create hundreds of opportunities.
Impressive Results
The results have been impressive—stopping ideas that save millions of dollars and validating ideas that generate millions in revenue.
We've also fostered a strong culture of open feedback and honest communication, which has been crucial for learning and improvement. This respectful dialogue ensures we genuinely improve rather than just telling ourselves we are. Creating the time and space to drive this has generated significant momentum and energy for experimentation into the next financial year.
I hope this has been useful as a real-world example of what we've learned over the last 12 months. I'd love to hear about your innovation experiences, challenges, or how you've dealt with similar issues.