Why I Sprint.

For most of my career, I’ve been lucky enough to work with some fantastically talented people doing genuinely meaningful work. Whether it’s been in product roles at the height of the dotcom boom in London, delivering new brands, experiences, businesses, products and services with awesome clients or finding new growth opportunities in startups - I’ve always been able to do something that has made working much more than just a job. I’ve always found a way to bring a passion to what I’m doing.

That is, until recently.

For the last couple of years, I’ve experienced what it is like to try and deliver new things (experiences, products, services) inside more ‘traditional’ businesses. To be honest it has sucked. It was simply a lot more frustrating than it needed to be. Everything took so long, even the smallest things.

I should share a little context at this point. I’ve spent a good part of my career not only working on great teams delivering cool stuff, but I’ve also been a keen student of why some organizations are able to consistently innovate where others are not.  

I’ve also been lucky enough to work with some really smart people in the organizational design world. These folks have been committed to helping companies find this apparent, ‘Magic Sauce’ for a long time. So, I have some knowledge of what works, what doesn’t and how to fix it.

Much of the approach to creating innovation ecosystems, when you start to explore it, is pretty logical. There is no ‘Magic Sauce’. Many large and seemingly traditional companies have redesigned critical pillars of their organizations to enable their own people to exercise their creativity and find new growth and revenue opportunities from within.  

What I know from trying to fix how the organization I worked in innovates, is that it’s extremely hard. In particular, when your day job is to lead a product team and you are measured by the success of the product you and your team ships. 

In short, I didn’t have a mandate to drive the change I wanted to, there was little appetite for the kind of change that needed to be introduced and I didn’t have the time. 

If you were to take a look at the scale of the change required to steer a large organization from being a haphazard innovator, to one that consistently shipped products, services and experiences that their customers loved, you’d understand why a lot of companies are unwilling to embark on the journey - regardless of the strategic need.

However, I’ve since found an approach that might help to short cut some of this.

Back in early 2016, a Googler called Jake Knapp wrote a book called, “The Sprint”. The Sprint promised to help companies solve big problems and test new ideas in just 5 days. At the time, I had just left IDEO where we did everything that Jake promised, except it didn’t take us 5 days. It took us quite a bit longer. 

I was sceptical, the work we did at IDEO was awesome. In my mind it simply wasn’t possible for someone to deliver the same quality of work in just 5 days. Anyway, I read the book in a day or two and then quickly put Jake’s methods into practice. 

At the time I was leading the small-but-awesome Innovation Management team at DBS Bank in Singapore. We tried it out on a few of the challenges that we were asked by the business to solve. 

I discovered quickly that I was wrong and a little bit right. I was right because you couldn’t deliver the same quality work in just 5 days. Well, that is, if ‘quality’ is a deliverable that is a complete story of a project, with deep insight from ethnographic research and a set of high resolution concepts.

However, if you already have good knowledge of your customer and the problem you are trying to solve, The Sprint works perfectly.

\Especially if you’re looking for a very fast way to find out if a product is worth developing, if a feature is worth the effort, or if your value proposition is really valid.  

Sprints give teams the confidence to test some of their wildest ideas and the courage to deliver on them.

They also give leaders the confidence that their teams know where to invest their time and the company’s resources.

This kind of experimentation reduces risk and is at the core of what is helping some of today’s most progressive companies succeed.  

Back to the fact that I’ve been lucky enough to do genuinely meaningful work. Well I think I’ve found it again in these Design Sprints. I’ve since left the company that inspired me to look for a better, faster way to deliver new brands, experiences, products and services. I’ve chosen to bring sprints to those companies looking for a way to rapidly innovate and progress as they evolve.  

I’ve set up Now What? to do this and I can’t wait to share more as I go on this journey.  

Do reach out to me if you’re interested in learning more.