This is the first of a set of three articles that explores the meaning, challenges, pitfalls and solutions of using Failing Fast strategies in established B2B businesses.
Failing Fast
Those of us working on product and innovation, or anyone with an interest in entrepreneurship have probably heard the term “Failing Fast”. Failing fast is a strategy commonly used to drive innovation and product creation. It values small iterative development steps followed by extensive testing to determine whether an idea has value. The main benefit of the strategy is to reduce the time and monetary costs of development. By having lower costs to explore ideas, more of them can be put to test, raising the probability of finding one that is successful.
There’s multiple reason for why an idea may fail, if we’re talking about a consumer product, product execution may have failed, the price may not be a market fit, time to market may be gone, or simply the product doesn’t fit the market necessity. In general, it’s often easier to find recipes for innovation that fail, than it is to find clear paths to success.
In situations where end outcome of the innovation will be a failure, it’s preferable to understand that as early as possible. Long development or research projects without any feedback loops can result on the inability to understand how successful the initiative will be. The longer you wait to understand outcome, the more you need to invest and the less margin you’ll have to pivot.
MVP Definition
One of the common results of following a fail fast strategy in product development is to scope and deliver Minimum Viable Products (MVPs). And MVP is the minimum amount of features that a product may have to drive value to a consumer. Henrik Kniberg has a great blog post on MVP definition: Making sense of MVP (Minimum Viable Product) – and why I prefer Earliest Testable/Usable/Lovable . The head image of the article has a perfect illustration of the process to derive and MVP and iterate on it:
If your customer is looking to buy a car and you don’t have the capacity to deliver it immediately, is far better to offer him a valid mean of transportation than offering him parts of a car that by themselves deliver no value. Will the customer be happy to get a skateboard/scooter/bicycle instead of a car? Absolutely not! But he’ll be able to get around much faster than if he was just walking places. In the process of iterating over the different products, you may learn that the customer enjoys riding while the sun shines and when you can actually get him the car, you make it a convertible which in the end will please the customer.
The journey of constantly delivering iterations over MVP products in principle should drive value to customers quickly, while minimizing product development costs. This approach is perfect for startups and is championed by Lean Startup advocates and book authors. However for bigger companies and specially for existing businesses, trying to innovate by failing fast may actually bring companies back years.
Scoping MVPs in Established Businesses
Setting expectations with customers tends to be easier when there’s less history or reputation from the company providing the product or service. If you have no prior history of delivering exceptional, function bulked products to your customers, the expectation that you’ll deliver such products on a new business is lower. This becomes even more visible if you’re trying to do business at an enterprise level, an environment that typically grants less chances for failures.
Several problems may come when you break the expectations of your customer. We’ll look deeper into these negative outcomes and how they affect B2B businesses in particular in the next article.