I thought I was an Agile Innovator… until I became one

What is Agile Innovation and how can I get better at it? Whenever I’ve asked myself that question, I’ve generally concluded that it was a buzzword for what I was already doing in my day to day work. Having worked as an Innovator at P&G, SC Johnson and Pfizer for 15 years, I felt that my track record of creating successful new products leveraging best-in-class processes would have taught me what I needed to know.

In 2020 I started a new role in Business Model Innovation at GAF, the world’s largest roofing manufacturer. Since this was very different from CPG and Healthcare, I found myself with a unique opportunity to experience Agile Innovation in a new way. In addition, I learned that technology and Start-ups have enabled leaner, meaner and faster methodologies that are particularly helpful in the Discovery or ‘fuzzy front end’ stage… Given our team’s mission is to create and build new scalable business models to disrupt the building materials industry, it was a chance to try some new approaches.

I wrote this article, not only because I had more time at home this year, but in the hopes that it may nudge some of you to experiment with new approaches - since it is a New Year after all!

As background, I’ve had the good fortune to lead teams in all stages of the innovation cycle. This experience has helped me to apply Agile Innovation which I find involves working faster and making decisions with less data. In today’s environment where faster results are expected with smaller budgets, and may involve competing with smaller, more nimble competitors, it’s never a bad thing to discover new approaches to improve how we innovate.

Back in the day, we usually started the Discovery phase with focus groups in multiple cities to identify insights and unmet needs, brainstorming sessions to create differentiated benefits and concepts, backed up by detailed market analysis and a robust amount of quantitative research to validate the idea. This worked well, but often required multiple external agency partners, cost a lot of money, and most importantly took a lot of time. Over the years, I’ve modified my approach to try a new vendor or methodology, trim costs or speed things up but generally speaking, I was either not willing to risk more experimental methods or was simply not aware of some of the more ‘Agile’ approaches to learn and experiment that are now available (and often free to try).

The Innovation team at GAF is an internal 'start-up' and in our first year exploring new territories, we learned and applied many Agile principles into our work. We built user journeys, led virtual Sprints, wrote concepts the next day and identified a minimal number of critical questions that we needed to answer. We often placed our ideas in more iterative testing methodologies such as unmoderated online user interviews that gave us results within hours… We’d review, discuss and then re-design the ideas and questions and put them back into testing sometimes as quickly as the next day. Eventually, the best ideas would be refined further and sometimes placed into social media testing such as Facebook Ads, with real-time monitoring and results within days.  

This approach allowed us to get just enough ‘scrappy’ learning to answer the most critical questions before running more experiments that allowed us to gain more insight. We learned a lot more every step of the way especially since we were leading much of the work ourselves, which in turn meant we moved faster and spent less on the process. Importantly, we were very diligent to document our learning and sources regularly so that we could trace our assumptions and modify them as we learn. Ultimately, our team created four new business models in 15 weeks with validated end-user feedback, a viable business model, and an excited leadership team which gave us additional capital to scale our ideas into Minimum Viable Products.  

This may sound exciting, but truthfully, it was not easy to get used to. I'm still learning how to be comfortable with this approach and thankfully our team challenges each other to stay focused on the ‘essential’ elements and 'deal killing' assumptions. I cut my teeth at P&G, which has an excellent, thorough and very disciplined innovation approach meant to mitigate risk. I still remember my 3-inch thick factbook with all the one pagers and analyses meant to answer any and all questions from leadership. Pfizer generally has even more complex processes and longer launch timelines given the nature of that business. In retrospect, I’m glad I learned a disciplined approach to Innovation but also feel that a good amount of what we did was more thorough than it needed to be… which in turn costs more money and takes longer. Perhaps worst of all, it can result in new opportunities being launched by faster and more agile competitors.

So in 2020 I learned that practicing Agile Innovation takes a lot more than just changing the department name or the title of your slide deck :). All kidding aside, it does take a very different mentality to only focus on the most essential assumptions, answering the most critical questions, a greater willingness to abandon ideas early, and having faith that you will find the right path over the course of your experimentation.

For those of you interested in creating new behaviors for yourself or your teams, here are some tips and tools you can try. At first, these approaches might feel uncomfortable or incomplete when you first begin to experiment with them. I certainly felt that way but ultimately realized that it was growing pains as I stretched myself as an Innovator.  

For those of us in environments where we have to engage and align multiple stakeholders, these approaches may seem difficult to implement or get buy in for, but they don’t have to be. Make it easy by building a small prototype, learn, adjust and do it again. Maybe it’s running a fake concept test on Facebook Ads or leading a few virtual interviews yourself using Usertesting.com. Push yourself out of your comfort zone, try something different and see what you learn. I think you’ll find it refreshing and likely enable you to create some new behaviors that will make you and your teams faster, leaner and more innovative.

Ideas to consider

1 - Shift the mix from focus groups to moderated/unmoderated interviews. Realness really set in when I led 1-1 interviews myself, or when we set up unmoderated recorded groups on Usertesting.com. Direct user feedback, especially in early stages, can help you learn and pivot quickly. Focus groups definitely have value and in fact, we had planned a battery of these right before the covid-19 lockdown forced us to be more scrappy. Looking back though I feel I leaned too much on focus groups due to force of habit and because they are easy to set up. However, you can learn so much from talking to just five people directly or watching 15 minute unmoderated interviews. It's also very time efficient - I watch unmoderated interviews much like I do podcasts - at 1.25x speed and skip over parts that are not as interesting. True story - I jokingly asked my team members to speak faster in live meetings because I felt they were talking too slowly. I DON'T recommend that you do that!

2 - Adopt a team communication platform like Slack or MS Teams. I understand the challenge with adopting multiple communication platforms, which can result in information overload and frustration. However, if you and your team can develop the discipline to use the tools appropriately, it should enable more efficient communication. I am now a big fan of Slack… I'm able to quickly tailor my communication to the right individuals and get responses faster. I hope that it will eventually replace the majority of email that we receive daily, which I doubt any of us would mind. It does require habit change and time to learn how to set it up so that it’s not more work that it’s worth. I recommend using the desktop version, disabling most of the notifications and shifting your IM to that platform… Importantly, remember to disconnect at the end of the day!

3 - Use online sharing tools like Miro, Mural or Google Jamboard - This is absolutely essential if you’re running remote workshops. Having the team be able to post and see virtual notes drives engagement and collaboration. It's also nice not having to collect physical sticky notes off the floor when they eventually fall off. I find Miro and Mural to have better UX and more features/templates you can use. They were particularly helpful in creating advanced value creation flowcharts which really helped illustrate and communicate our new business models. You may want to orient your team to this new approach as I've found many aren't as used to listening/talking/posting at the same time.

4 - Use online project management tools like Trello to manage team workflow.  We moved to shorter and more frequent ‘Stand-Up’ meetings to stay connected using Trello to keep track of who’s doing what when. This has become more efficient than multiple 1-1s or detailed topic discussions with 20 people which we all know can drag on. For these to work, your team needs to be disciplined about focusing on what was accomplished, key barriers and what needs to be completed this week. The one caveat is that this approach limits camaraderie amongst team members and so you may want to intersperse these highly focused meetings with more social engagements so it’s not “all work and no play”. I’ve also seen sophisticated Trello users create impressive user flows using color coded approaches to help the team understand detailed target UX experiences which is pretty cool.

5 – Test fast and cheap - Facebook and Linkedin Ads were surprisingly useful to find and get feedback from prospective end users which helped us shape and pivot the ideas. Even if you're not completely sure about the user target, you do need to be very disciplined about knowing what you're trying to learn as these tools are more limited in scope. Know that you will probably answer the questions iteratively with multiple, small experiments.

Please let me know what you think and what you learn in your experiment. I’m always interested in learning from others as I continue my Agile Innovation journey. If helpful, I’ll plan to share more in the future, including books or other methods that can help you gain momentum.

Garsen Yap is inspired to create bold new strategies and innovative new approaches to drive growth for category leading companies and brands.