19-Small projects, fast learning cycles

What lessons can Google teach your customers about driving change and market disruption—why you must define the change agenda of buyers?

SMALL-TEAM ADVANTAGE

The revolution of customer engagement will entail significant changes in marketing operations and the larger enterprise.

Unlike historical changes such as personal computers and corporate networks—faster, cheaper extensions of business as usual—the revolution in customer engagement must accommodate two new factors:

• The growing number of innovations in a global business ecosystem that a firm can quickly source and integrate to its marketing operation.
• The collective knowledge that customers spans global social networks, effectively refuting the commercial speech of marketers and agencies.

This means that firms must now pursue a though-through strategy for sourcing and integrating the innovation resources of a global business ecosystem, thereby increasing competitive advantage and the ability to attract, serve, and satisfy profitable customers for life.

Firms that can drive newly sourced innovation to customers in days or weeks will enjoy competitive advantages; with good timing and luck, these firms can disrupt the competitive equilibrium of established and well-defended markets.

It also means that firms must improve their ability to identify and understand the rapid evolution of customers’ needs. Often, “listening” starts in social networks: Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

Listening then picks up the pace with social media monitoring, summarizing the mood of the market (topics, brands, and sentiment), voice of the customer (status, issues, and likely next-action steps)  and patterns of engagement (brand interactions by touchpoint, volume and intensity of interactions, and progressive disclosures of truthful information).

It then must follow that the mobilization of social networks can and will drive market disruption. So, what’s your mobilization strategy?

GOOGLE MIND-SET

Google demonstrates a key facet of innovation leadership: Innovate out loud and in front of customers using small, agile teams.

In practical terms, Google gets to market fast, studies users’ reactions, incorporates users’ feedback, and re-launches a new and improved version within days or weeks.

The figure below depicts three important innovation strategies drawn from the Google playbook.

First, not all innovations represent the same type of value. Innovations may represent intangible, tactical, strategic, or transformational value.

Some innovations, especially if adopted, can and will create new competitive advantages.

In rarer cases, well-marketed innovations cause market disruptions, forcing competitors to react with profit-destroying discounts or to exit the market altogether.

Second, time to value—how quickly a firm can identify a customer requirement, source the needed capability, and deploy a needed service or product—enhances the overall value of an innovation. Faster time to value of several tactical innovations can and will create competitive advantage, if not market disruption.

Third, rapid consistent deployment of several well-chosen tactical innovations have proven the most reliable way to disrupt a market within a few months or within a year.

For this reason, innovation leaders drive several tactical innovations in customer engagement, using a master roadmap of 15-day and 45-day projects that a single person or small group can complete with available resources.

Let us restate this: firms can produce game-changing innovations of customer engagement using a master roadmap of 15-day and 45-day projects that a single person or small group can complete with available resources.

MARKET DISRUPTION

Rapid, successive delivery of many small, incremental innovations can add up to real competitive advantages and game-changing market disruptions.

Innovation leaders develop and hone this as a strategic operational capability: how to deconstruct a market-disrupting initiative into a set of 15-day or 45-day projects and execute those projects against a master project roadmap of 50 to 100 short-term projects.

The revolution in customer engagement entails a growing array of customer self-service applications.

The revolution in customer engagement will require a technical platform for integrating and provisioning these new innovations—contributions of a global business ecosystem.

The revolution in customer engagement will succeed with mastery of the 15-day project.

If you need help creating 15-day projects with customers, call us. We can help!

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