Agility in business: Design, test, repeat
Recently I saw Simon Griffiths speak, he is the co-founder of Who Gives a Crap and was very generous in sharing his journey and lessons learned along the way. One that stood out is the way they have built their business around the ability to experiment, tweak and adapt. This thinking can work on a large scale (say product innovation) but also on a small scale (say email campaigns).
BRANDING BEFORE BREAKFAST EP38 – Agility in business: Design, test, repeat
Recently, I saw Simon Griffiths speak. He’s the co-founder of Who Gives A Crap and he was very generous in sharing his journey and some of the lessons that he has learned along the way. So one of those that really stood out is the way that they’ve built their business around change and agility. They experiment, they tweak, they refine and they release. So I’ll give you a bit of an insight into how this works. When they’re creating a new product they will actually release it to only 10% of their audience. Then they’ll get feedback, they’ll make changes and then they’ll re-release it. And again it might still go to a subset, another 10%. So it’s only when they feel really confident that they’re hitting the mark for their customers that they’ll actually release it to their entire audience. I thought that was really interesting. And an example, so Simon himself has always found it super frustrating that tissue boxes have empty space above the tissues. So he decided that they should be filled all the way to the top. Once they released this, they soon realised it was a huge source of frustration for their customers because basically you couldn’t get the tissues out. You couldn’t get one at a time or you get them out and they’d all rip so they realised they needed to make some changes and kind of meet somewhere in the middle.
This thinking can be applied on a large scale, so product development and innovation, but then also on a much smaller scale. So they do exactly the same thing with their email campaigns. Send it to 10%, make changes, send it again and then go to the wider audience when they’re really confident. So this is a really powerful approach to doing business. Firstly, it means the minimum investment to get feedback and then make changes. So it’s going to be cheaper. The second thing is by definition you’re customer centric. Your customers are being involved in every single step which means it’s impossible to not be serving their needs. So the opportunity here is to think about how you can take this thinking and apply it even if it’s in a small way, or possibly it’s in a big way. That’s it from me. It’s time for brekkie.
Written by: Jodie de Vries
Published: November 28, 2019