Let me set the scene.
It’s late 2019, and I’m in a local Cambridge pub armed with a pint of craft stout (and probably looking for an appropriate window to snap it for my @beerbootsandbikes, the insta channel that blends my passions and projects).
I’m with the CMO, a Marketing Director and a Front-End Innovation Director from the European arm of a global drinks and food business.
As much as I could have spent these 90 minutes waxing lyrical about the provenance and founders’ story of that wonderful craft stout, we were there on official business… an interview for a new role heading up insights for a break-the-mould innovation team they were assembling.
New, in more than name
The mission of this trio?
To challenge an otherwise successful organisation to make better/faster (not quick/dirty) decisions on new product development. And their take on NPD was broad — extended brand propositions, new liquids, new subcategories… a blank sheet, so to speak.
Without doubt, the word of the meeting was ‘agile’. Agile research, agile culture, agile methodologies, agile processes.
This wasn’t just a case of talking the talk, though.
They’d formed a very small, multidisciplinary, and geographically-dispersed team. A cast of characters from R&D, marketing, open innovation, and design, with the belief that the magic would happen at the point of intersection (not with any single expert or ‘silo’ in hierarchy over another, as can be the default for many organisations).
My soon-to-be new bosses signed-up to a set of principles they’d stand by. We’d be empowered. Experiment-driven. Efficient not perfect. Situational leadership would replace hierarchy. Checkpoints instead of stage-gates. Licence to cut through organisational silos. Senior leaders self-designated as ‘broom sweepers’, to clear the way as we went.
I was on-board. A ‘dream team’ of equals, given not just an empty mandate but the right conditions to position us for success. It was everything I believed to be right about innovation.
Sound a bit too good to be true?
Too often, ‘co-creation’ is a term used to disguise questions loaded with predetermined answers. But in this instance, the agile programme was still in a strawman form when I showed up, and we really were given free rein to shape a process that met our needs (and in time, this freedom really stretched and challenged us).
But could I do it?
Here’s where the self-doubt (or ‘imposter syndrome’, as recently popularised) kicked in. Something, I believe, visits all of us, even the best or [seemingly] most confident/accomplished of us.
Bringing the goods
At first glance, what I was actually being tapped for felt broadly within my comfort zone — championing the voice of the consumer, providing leadership of consumer insights, and implementing agile research tools at all stages of the process.
I just wasn't so sure about the ‘agile’ part. What did they really mean? What was, and therefore what wasn’t, agile? Was this just another en vogue buzzword? Or something more substantive, just yet-to-be-defined?
I’d created value propositions, moderated traditional focus groups, embraced design thinking, and facilitated sprints. But creating and embedding agile research tools and adapting to whatever that way of thinking felt new to me.
Would that be ok? Could I use what I already knew and wing it, or would I be expected to ‘bring the goods’ and hit the ground running? Or was ‘agile’ really just a reframing of the fundamentals, meaning two decades of experience leading research, insights, and innovation on both client- and agency-side would be enough to jump in the deep-end after all?
Knowing what you [don't] know
Anytime I do something new, I like to start with what I know.
And what I know is people — not consumers, customers, suppliers, stakeholders, or any other label we hide them behind… but people. So I sought out anything and everything we had that talked to real people. Not segments, not pen portraits, not clusters. People.
Side note — something our team agreed early on, and perhaps against the grain for many organisations, was that being agile meant prioritising quality over quantity. We wouldn’t use big sample sizes as a proxy for credibility (at best), or a crutch (at worst). Instead, our focus was fewer conversations done better… and giving the nuggets from these consumer interactions the space to ‘bubble up’ rather than be drowned out by scale.
My first win was a perfect example of this…
I stumbled across Ricky Shah, a local market insights controller who’d already started experimenting with agile tools in the business. He’d created a small-but-perfectly-formed online community panel to gather real-time feedback, from real people who were — literally — willing to open their cupboards to us and share anything and everything about what they were eating and drinking, when, where and why.
And he’d sourced an online quant supplier that gave us DIY, overnight survey capabilities to rapidly expand anecdotes into data.
He’d also started stretching our view on future drinks subcategories, and had partnered with an agency to deliver one of most engaging debrief sessions I'd ever attended, bringing to life how the lines were blurring and giving us samples to taste.
You've gotta lean in
Seeing this play out gave me hope. I could see the potential in what was already happening in pockets, and how having a basic palette of agile tools, supported by a choiceful selection of strategic research partners (#futurepostalert), could help us across Europe.
As the song goes, “I had to start it somewhere, so it started there”... in my case, deploying these agile tools beyond our local market to the rest of Europe.
And this is how I started my journey. No reinventing the wheel. Just refining, lifting, and shifting early signs of promise into other areas that we had in our sights.
Within a few weeks, I had commissioned my first bit of community panel work and done a bit of DIY online testing. I was talking to research partners and internal stakeholders about how these capabilities might be of use in other key markets. It wasn't much, but it was enough, for now, to get started. To put some basics in place.
I was stretching my comfort zone, leaning on the expertise of others who had been down this path, and finding it was OK to not always be the expert in the room.
Ready, set, lockdown
As an innovation team, we began moving at pace, using a new language, testing and learning, We had a can-do mindset, and, in the world of Ted Lasso, our locker-room sign would have read JFDI (#ifyouknowyouknow).
But we needed to keep pushing beyond that. And now that we had the basics down, we could start to really experiment.
One of our marketing leads had scouted a drinks entrepreneur who had set up a working coffee shop in Wandsworth, and within a few months we would set up shop there.
By day, we literally pulled our respondents off the street, talking to them about their purchases, and inviting them to co-create designs and liquids. By night, we’d take our ideas to a local bottle shop, buy people drinks, and ask them for their input to our work in progress ideas in exchange.
As a self-described world-citizen with a career spanning iconic global brands, there’s nothing quite as humbling-at-the-same-time-energising as standing outside a pop-up venue in SW18 holding a sign reading ‘10 min survey = Free beer’.
This would be our last intervention before lockdown, which would come to change everything (#understatement). Thankfully, the tools we’d be building would come to serve our remote, lockdown-governed world — and our team — well. More on that later (#futurepostalert).
But, hey, it’s important to celebrate the wins — with the approach our team took, within approximately three months of starting this new role, we knew what we knew, and what we needed to learn. Some gaps, perhaps — but identified ones.
> Insight in hindsight
In summary, here’s a couple of things I’ve marked down as the ‘big learnings’. This is by no means an exhaustive list… more a few reflections that have helped me and may benefit others (#payitforward)… just as much as I’d love to have them challenged or added to by a fellow insight or innovation enthusiast reading this (#alwayslearning).
1️⃣ Life imitates art, even if at first it feels like paint-by-numbers. I never expected so much of what I do in my day-to-day to have been influenced by the JFDI agile approach we took to testing and learning. It’s like exercising and using muscles you didn’t know you have. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it, and you apply it to everything else in life.
2️⃣ Seek out the stars — they might just need dusting off or be found hiding in plain sight. Once you start looking, you’ll probably uncover great initiative happening in pockets. You’ll find them in your teams, in unlikely corners of the business, or even hiding in a coffee shop. Being humble, approachable, and willing to ask for help might just reveal a treasure trove of insight, passion, and consumer closeness all around you.
3️⃣ It’s a journey, not a destination. Becoming agile is something that doesn’t just ‘happen’ after three months, or even three years. It’s not something you can do in isolation, or something you attain by delivering a product to market in record time. As a team, we gained the most value not from a ‘big move’ but focusing on continuous learning of what we knew, what we thought we knew, and what we didn’t know.
I love the ‘power of three’ and it’d be easy to stop here, but there’s a fourth takeaway for me which is worthy of sharing, and perhaps the most important (to me, at least).
4️⃣ Ready as you’ll never be. I’ve tried to be candid in this first post about some of the vulnerabilities I felt when I started this journey. Truth is, things really felt touch and go for the first few months. Self-doubt isn’t just a catchphrase or fodder for a shareable post… it was real for me, as I’ve no doubt it is for many. I’ve tried to share some of the practical early steps I/we took on the ‘become agile’ journey… but I’d hate to leave the impression that it was as simple as an answer at the bottom of an espresso cup in the aforementioned coffee shop.
For three months (and probably beyond), I was unlearning and reframing what I’d built up as second-instinct or muscle-memory over my career. Thankfully, I received a lot of feedback which I was all too happy to take on-board, even if it meant changing the way I’d always done things.
Jump in…
I’d love to hear from others who’ve faced these sorts of changes, or can just relate to some of the musings above... #getinvolved ⬇️
ps~ hat-tip to Jon Acuff for the title of this blog… it’s a quote from a book of his and it perfectly captures what I wanted to say… so I respectfully plagiarise, or steal with pride, as our team used to say.