On our Customer Advisory Board interviews with executives we often hear the following comments from clients:
- “Speed is the currency.”
- “We need to build this so we can drive experiments and fail fast.”
- “Scale is the challenge.”
But as we explored these three areas further with some of the Board advisors, we learned the following:
- “Speed leads to too many mistakes.”
- “Failure is really expensive.”
- “Experiments aren’t designed for scale.”
In reaction to these observations, one Customer Advisory Board member suggested that perhaps we need a new goal of failing slowly. She went on to explain that in her industry, failure is extremely expensive. Instead of ‘running fast and breaking things’ her team developed a model that requires all experiments to be designed for scale. This inevitably slows the teams down a bit, but the results moved her team out of pilot purgatory to successfully scaling experiments.
In 2020 consider new models and approaches to help you get to scale and speed – you may find that to get there slowing down a little helps.