Solve big problems fast (in just 4 practical steps)

Forty years from now, technology will be up to one trillion times more advanced than today. A vast number of start-ups, shake-ups and bust-ups await. But how will today’s retailers fare during the ride?

With constant change, those who fail to set and fulfil customer expectations will soon be left behind. Our need for insight and experience is greater than ever before.

Retailers’ ability to identify key strategic challenges is pivotal. However, more vital is our ability to select, drive and deliver innovation in a rapid and meaningful way.

Fear not. Help is at hand.

Our scarcest commodity is time

Exponential capability can eradicate many of life’s most troubling problems, from never missing a bargain to sharing ‘that photo’ on Instagram. The volume of technology at our disposal simultaneously saves time and extends our ‘to do’ list. Society is busier than ever before, and marketers are no exception.

These time pressures challenge our ability to innovate. Which technology should we back? How do we understand its true potential? How do we access the expertise we need, let alone reach a consensus and convince a decision-maker?

Concepts such as the ‘minimum viable product’ (MVP), ‘growth hacking’ and ‘agile innovation’ allow companies to boycott the tapestry of complexity that often entwines those embarking on ‘big ideas’.

In the book Sprint, Google Ventures shows how even the biggest consumer ideas can be prototyped and tested inside one week. However, when following traditional decision flows, prototypes can take a year (or more) to deliver, without certainty of real-world success. Worse still, markets evolve, expectations grow and competitors take hold.

We need freedom to innovate in moments, rather than months.

Our need for success may be the very thing that prevents it

The innate human need for progress and our natural resistance to change seem paradoxical. This in itself is often the key determinant of time delays.

Change can be frustrating, can take an age, costs money and is a distraction from stability. To succeed at solving big problems fast, we need to tackle these challenges head-on.

Innovation is risky; our inherent need is to de-risk

It is ironic that tackling a problem at high speed and low cost can remove greater risk than many slower, more considered approaches. Failing rapidly and learning wisely often leads to more significant returns than attempting to get it 100% right first time.

The 4 steps to solving big problems fast

1. Create a platform for innovation

Part of the answer, it seems, rests in the realms of time management and organisational culture. We need the right resource, assigned to the right people, at the right time. Bake a cake, if you will. A dash of insight, a sprinkle of the right skills, a splash of decision-making and some devoted time in the oven. It all needs processing together.

Dedicating meaningful, focused time to innovation, with the right people on hand, can accelerate your decision-making – getting your ideas in front of consumers and tested in record time. This will, however, mean carefully prioritising, thus diverting effort away from other less critical projects.

Assign values for ease, cost and opportunity; rank them according to potential ROI and interrogate feasibility before focusing time and money. Critically, the cost of time should not typically exceed one-third of the opportunity, or the capacity of your team/organisation to make and act upon decisions.

Whilst making sense of change is an operational necessity, the skills required to drive innovation are not always possessed by those tasked to run a steady ship. Assigning innovation tasks to those with the scope, skills and capacity to drive things forwards is crucial to success. These may not be the people with the job title of best fit.

Perhaps most fundamentally, freedom must be granted to take measured risks and learn from failure, without the threat of personal harm, e.g. loss of job or stature.

2. Simplify requirements

With the scene set, desks clear and your A-team in place, you’ll need to make some early decisions. Which problems are most significant? What is the scale of cost and opportunity and how should we focus our resources? Insight is required to separate the wheat from the chaff and the facts from the opinions.

The secret is that many ‘vital’ up-front research questions may not be so vital. An objective view can help us focus on the things we need to act on, rather than those which hold the greatest interest.

Time has an inherent opportunity cost attached. The cost of over-engineering ‘the right’ solution can greatly exceed that of rapidly testing a solution that’s on the right track. Iterative experimentation is often the slightly more daunting but more economical option.

3. Build a prototype

Whether your innovation project takes the form of a new strategy, digital build, or physical product, prototypes can be key to delivering your project at a low cost and with a high return. The term ‘rapid prototyping’ is commonly used in 3D computer-aided design; however, it’s used here to describe a clear and rapid articulation of a product or service concept to solicit consumer feedback. The focus is on finding and solving problems fast. Together, prototyping and consumer testing provide a continuous loop of feedback and enhancement, allowing marketers to devise a commercially viable solution with minimal time and money.

Imagine a website guided not by data or insight, but by designer intuition. Whilst instinct should not be dismissed, studies show it cannot be overly relied upon either (see Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow). Clients rely on web agencies to build perfectly targeted solutions, but so often these projects display a dip, rather than a growth in key metrics. Where linear ‘big bang’ projects do display growth, there is often no programme of continuous improvement post-launch. Worse still, the architecture may prohibit it.

Rapid prototyping allows innovators to test and learn faster, engaging in iterative development, which avoids the pitfalls of costly ‘build and forget’ solutions.

4. Lo-fi consumer testing

Successful innovation relies on mutual value exchange. By offering meaningful value to consumers, we can hope to generate meaningful value in return. Consumer testing helps ensure this value is equally appealing and beneficial to both parties.

Through testing, new problems present themselves, as do opportunities for progressive learning. So we need to ensure our rapid prototypes get rapid scrutiny. Understanding consumer success criteria at the outset is critical to the tests we deploy. But most exciting is our ability to learn a significant amount in a single day, by taking an entrepreneurial approach – venturing out of the office and into the world outside. In a retail context, this may require strong relationships with regional and store managers as well as senior marketers and product owners. Set clear criteria for success and ensure your testing/feedback answers your research questions with clarity and objectivity.

This rapid form of prototyping and consumer testing aims to significantly reduce opportunity cost, with minimal time and maximum output. Critically, testing must be inextricable from a product’s design process and should not end after launch. Product launch is simply a stage in the test cycle.

Making it happen

Whilst the theory above may sound advantageous, the practice may feel a little… well… impractical.

Taking an objective view of priorities through a customer lens can be a key challenge, as can the notion of having no answers without insight.

Start by listing out and categorising known challenges and supporting insights. Rank these collaboratively and assign focused resources in order of priority. Develop a rapid prototype with stripped-down functionality, and solicit consumer opinion with haste.

Finally, communicate areas of focus with clarity, before, during and after their development, to gain broader engagement from the wider team.

With the right people, culture and focus, your next innovation can be prototyped and tested in days or weeks, rather than months or years. Go on, give it a go!

This article was written by Duncan Hayes and first appeared on The Real Adventure Unlimited CRM Life blog