Build a Fail Team

Breakfasts with my coworker friend Tom are always dynamic. He's got maybe 3000 hobbies, everything from cycling, salsa, wing chun, and so much more. Oh, he's a drummer. I should add in that. Today, we got excited about an idea that we called "Fail Team." We were discussing the importance of failure.

Fail Team

Here's the truth: people in companies develop a fear of failure. They want to do well. They don't want to hear bad things from the leadership. No one really *wants* to fail. And yet, if you never want to fail again, just set a course to do nothing important.

What if a company had a fail team? The team's whole job is to fail. Over and over. Break the products. Ruin the process. Make everything come apart.

What would it look like? For one, you really can't involve an actual customer in failure. That wouldn't be a great business plan. But you could act like customers and see what you shake out of the system. If you don't know what they're experiencing, how do you know what to sell, how to support, what it will take for a win?

Another great detail of a fail team is they can teach us what we think should work but doesn't. What if onboarding the customer feels like an easy thing, but it's not? We have a software app that we sell that, midway through the process, the customer has to switch to another system, make a few changes, and then switch back to the app. People used to get very messed up by this, until we learned what they were going through and at least were able to add some popups to say, "Hey, don't forget to do this thing, and then come back." That little change made a massive decision.

Who Would Lead a Fail Team?

The fail team could be set to different tasks in the organization. I think maybe a COO function would be the best place to roll it up, or maybe a CFO, in a weird way. It can't be tied to any particular product discipline. Has to be an out-of-band function.

Who leads this? The kind of person to lead a fail team has to be very right-brained and creative. But they also have to have diligence and a process. They have to know how to ask the wrong questions, try the worst ways to do something, make all the mistakes.

And they need executive support. A fail team will surely be a bit despised. Think about their role. It's very "devil's advocate," and I am NOT a big fan of such humans typically.

But a fail team leader? That might make sense.

Chris...