Chapter 8 Friday morning
“Tell me what you think of this new blend of coffee,” said Nick, placing two mugs on the table in front of Slater and Zak.
“Doing some market research are we?” asked Slater.
“Of course,” Nick replied, grinning widely.
Zak then spoke.
“We’ve seen how you can identify new ideas for your businessbut what do you do with them once you have them? Well, the last thing you‘d ever do is try to keep them in your head because you’re bound to forget some of them.”
“Probably all of them in my case,” said Nick, touching his temple with a finger and flicking it into the air.
“It’s important to write ideas down as soon as they come to you and it’s best to keep them all in one locationand not scattered around in different places. The ideal place to keep them is in an ideas hopper.”
They both looked quizzically at Zak, so he continued.
“An ideas hopper is your store of potential opportunities that you believe are worth considering. You’ll most likely have far more ideas than you will ever have time or resources to deliverbut that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You can keep moving these ideas around, building them up, or breaking them down into smaller components. You don’t have to do all of your ideas, as you’ll keep adding new ones that may replace older ones because they’re better in some way.”
Zac tasted his coffee and nodded approvingly towards Nick to indicate his satisfaction.
“Another thing to understand is that every idea has its time. Occasionally an idea that has been lurking in your hopper for a good while will suddenly appear to be the perfect thing to do at that moment. As you only have so many hours in a day, it’s fine to keep re-prioritising your ideas based on your time and resource availabilityand immediate need. Your ideas hopper is your backlog of opportunitiesor things you want to do to grow your business.”
“And when you’ve got time you just pick one and do it. Is that right?” asked Nick.
“You don’t pick one at random,” admonished Zak, gently. “You select the best one to do at that particular timeand you don’t just do it. It’s much better to have a structured process that helps you deliver it quickly and with some validation along the way to give you greater confidence it’s a good thing to be doing. This structured process is called a sprint and it helps you to do one of two things. Either you deliver it speedily, in order to get the value from it sooneror you learn quickly that there’s a major issue with it that isn’t going to pan out for you. Then you stop progressing it to prevent you wasting any more time and effort on it. Does that make sense?”
“Is this what they call failing fast? Where if something is going to fail, you need to know this as early as possible?” asked Slater.
“Exactly. Let me explain how a sprint works.” Zak opened his notebook and drew eight small boxes in a horizontal line.
“This is a sprint track to rapidly advance your growth idea through to completion. Each sprint has eight components represented by these boxes to ensure you have the greatest chance for that particular sprint to be successful in its delivery and outcome.”
He tapped the first box with his pen. “This box is the What and When. Give your sprint a name to identify it and decide when you want to have it completed by. And that’s the first stage done.”
“That’s all there is to that stage?” asked Slater, surprised at the simplicity.
“Yes,” responded Zak. “All these stages are simplebut so important for success. If you don’t put a completion date down then it may get pushed out by other items and end up as something you started but never completed. Has that ever happened to either of you in the past?”
They laughed guiltily, both well aware that this was true.
Zak moved his pen along to the second box on his diagram.
“The next stage is to ask yourself the question Why will the customer want this? It’s important to make sure that your customers will definitely want this idea you are doingand that it’s not just something you think the customer wants. Your growth needs to be based on factsnot fantasy. Write down your view of why the customer would want this thing. Sometimes it may be obvious to you from your business perspective, but put yourself in the mind of the customer. Would they really want this from you? And What would their reasons for wanting it be?”
Zac moved his pen again to the next box in line.
“This stage is where you get proof of need, and there’s no better way of doing this than hearing some actual customer quotes as validation. This is called the Voice of the Customer. It’s an extremely powerful tool in determining what you should do to grow your businessfor it’s the customer telling you what they like, and don’t like, about your proposition. Doing this research may feel a bit uncomfortable to you, as it’s hard to hear a customer saying they wouldn’t want to buy something that you want to see happen. But it’s much better to hear these words at this stage rather than go to a lot of effort creating a new product and then finding out nobody wants to buy it. The questions you ask shouldn’t all be closed questions that require a simple yes or no answer. They should encourage the customer to talk. Ask questions like What appealsor doesn’t appealto you about this idea? What would make it better for you? Would you buy this from usand why, or why not? These are the sort of questions that provide gold dust in the answers you get back that enable you to change what you propose to do to suit what customers are saying about it.”
“We spoke about doing research previously too,” said Nick. “I never realised the value and importance of it.”
“It’s vitally important,” replied Zak. “Getting this kind of feedback from customers or potential customers is the best thing you can possibly do in many ways. Because the entire future success of your business depends on their willingness to put their hands in their pockets and pull out money to buy your product or service. This might sound a bit mercenary, but it’s a fact of lifeor should I say a fact of business.”
“So what’s the next stage?” asked Nick, keenly.
“It’s to define what success will look like,” answered Zak. “You need to identify some kind of measure so you’ll know that this sprint has been a success. It could be a hard business metric such as the number of units soldor it could be something softer such as what customers will be saying in social media about your service. How you measure the success is entirely your choicebut when you come to review the sprint, you need to know for sure whether it’s a winner or a loser.”
His pen tapped the next box in the sequence.
“Your next action is to work out how you can quickly test this idea. For example, with you Slater, if you wanted to produce a fancy, glossy brochure showing your kitchen transformations, then rather than getting it professionally designed and printed, why not first mock something up and show it to people you can trust to give you honest feedback. Of course you’d explain it’s a prototype, but if they came back and said there’s too much text and not enough images, then that would be the case even if it was professionally laid out and printed on quality paper. In the start-up world they call this the Minimal Viable Product or MVP. It’s the most basic form of something that enables you to put it in front of your target customers to gauge their reaction to it. So you need to think how you can get a low-fidelity sample in front of customers that you can test to get their feedback. And how quickly you can do thiswhich leads onto the next stage which is Which customers should you test it on? You need to decide which of your customers you want to use to test and validate the demand for this. Consider the best way to set this upand then make it happen. For you Nick, you may want to invite some of your regular customers back for a tasting session where you provide them a number of different dishes and ask them questions about which appeal to them and which don’tand of course, why. This is a good way for you to get an idea of what the demand for a particular product might be.”
“And that wouldn’t be difficult or expensive for me to do considering how much I’d learn from what they said afterwards,” commented Nick, making a note in his notebook to try this approach.
“We then come to the penultimate stage which is What key problems need resolving? As nothing ever goes superbly-well the first time, you need to identify what the biggest issues are that you will face in bringing this sprint into realityand make a plan for how you’ll overcome them. This leads into the final stage where you identify the activities you need for final delivery. Here’s where you list and detail all the tasks required to make this sprint a reality in your business. Once these items are in progress or completed, then you can go back to your hopper to consider what idea will form the next sprint that you’ll undertake.”
“And is that it?” asked Slater.
“Yes. Eight stagesall quite smallbut each with a specific purpose. And at each stage, if something negative arises that you can’t overcome, then you drop that idea and move onto finding another idea to execute. You see how this helps you to stop an idea that isn’t going to succeed early, before you’ve spent too much time and effort on it?”
“Definitely,” replied Nick, turning to Slater who also nodded in agreement.
“Time for me to go now. And our next session on Monday will be our final one,” said Zak. “See you here at the same timeand have a productive weekend.”