How long does it take to get your product to market? Months, years maybe, of discussions, planning, development and testing. What if you could trim that down to just a few days?
Welcome to the world of startup sprints. To the uninitiated, this is the practice championed by the like of GV (formerly Google Ventures) of identifying a problem, developing a solution and testing it with real customers over five days.
Usually the domain of tech startups, sprints are in keeping with the Silicon Valley mantra: “fail fast, fail often, learn quickly”. Don’t worry about the prototype being perfect; once it’s out there for your customers to use, you’ll quickly see what works and what doesn’t.
“We have a little bit longer than a five-day sprint. We do weekly sprint planning but I think we have a deployment every two weeks,” says Charlotte Pearce, founder of hand-written direct marketing company Inkpact. “We do have [the fail fast] mentality and that is something that we use: quick turnaround, you test it, you measure it, and it’s ok if it didn’t work.”
Gearing up for Christmas, Pearce explains that Inkpact is reflecting on the lessons learnt from a test carried out during last year’s festive season. “We wanted to develop a very easy option for customers to send hand-written Christmas cards. It wasn’t part of our product development at the time, so we developed a site to test whether people wanted them.
“We built it in about 10 days. It was an e-commerce site so you had to pay on there and upload a database of your contacts. Parts of it worked – we knew that people did want personalised Christmas cards – and parts of it didn’t; we knew [the site] wasn’t enough and we didn’t have enough information.
“In theory we failed, but we did get loads of learning. We had to test it lean, we had to make mistakes, but we learned a lot about what the customer wanted.”
For a startup or SME with limited development funding, the sprint model is relatively inexpensive, and with fewer people in the chain of command, it’s easier to sign off on new ideas, interact with customers, and implement changes efficiently. In its younger days Facebook got ahead of the competition by pushing updates out quickly and worrying about glitches afterwards, however now, Zuckerberg has said, the company is too big to use that approach.
Alex Hanson-Smith, who co-founded his mobile recruitment startup inploi.me in 2015 to connect employers in the hospitality industry with job seekers, says testing in this way has been key to developing the company’s products. “We are constantly building new evolutions of the product and we use rapid prototyping to do that,” he explains. “How can we make this experience better? What can we do to make it easier to build a profile, or provide employers with more information about job seekers? We build really quickly and then we test it on real users. That allows you to mitigate failing in a real life situation, you’re failing in a closed environment.”
inploi embraces taking risks, which Hanson-Smith believes is key to success as a startup, but the length of his “sprints” depend on whatever it is he’s testing. A simple tweak could take a matter of hours, “but if we’re testing an on-boarding flow or something like that, we’ll probably test it for a good few weeks because you need to get a very varied group of people.”
Part of failing fast is creating prototypes that are fairly rudimentary to test the idea on customers. When trialling an idea for software to allow small businesses to update their websites effectively via an automated artificial intelligence system, Chris John, director at website provider Smart Little Web, built a simple landing page asking interested parties to enter an email address.
Building the kind of algorithmic solution he had in mind – something that would scrape data and redesign a website that was both highly functional and looked great – would have taken about a year. As it turns out, no one was interested. “We could have done it the old way – built a complete magic system that did all this stuff, but even giving it away for free we couldn’t get anything, so that would have been a complete waste of time,” he says.
Spotting an unsuccessful project and knowing when to cut your losses is one of the crucial lessons for a startup, Hanson-Smith says. “Time is your most valuable resource. Being decisive has proved to be really helpful for us. In the early days we were working with [a developer] who wasn’t really right for our company. It became very clear early on that it wasn’t working as well as it should, so we were very decisive. Even though it meant basically we lost two months of time developing, we said ‘let’s start again’.
“You have to make a decision and stick to it. And if it is wrong, it’s how pick yourself up after that and say ‘ok why was that the wrong decision?’ That’s where you’re learning.”
The lessons learned in sprints often go beyond whatever it is that’s being tested. John says rapid testing can show how effective a marketing strategy is, for example, or let you test different advertising platforms. “Beyond the actual product, there’s all the stuff that sits around it. Have you optimised your Facebook adverts so they don’t cost you too much? Have you tried alternative marketing tactics? Each time you learn something,” he says.
Of course, you might not get the clear answer you’d hoped for. “When you’re building something, there are often times when literally 50% of people say they love it, and 50% hate it,” Hanson-Smith says. “And it’s then really important and sometimes painstaking to dig down into what they like about it and don’t like about it.”
However helpful the sprint model and fail fast mantra can be to growth, the Silicon Valley mentality should be embraced with a pinch of salt. Pearce says that while sprint tests have helped her company to grow, it’s important to keep perspective on the bigger picture. She believes that focusing solely on sprints can be discouraging to team members who prefer to take ownership of projects, and it means other things that are crucial to running a successful business, like team culture, get ignored.
“[It] can be detrimental if it’s not managed and not reflected on in the right way. I think as a company it’s just making sure you’ve got a balance of everything,” she says. “ ‘Failure’ is quite a negative word ... But I think the underlying assumptions of learning from everything you do should always be there.”
For Hanson-Smith, the sprint model and “failing fast” is inevitable as a startup. “The very nature of a startup is you’re trying to push the boundaries, and the incumbent risks require you to try stuff that no-one else has tried before,” he says. “A lot of the time that results in failure, and it’s how you deal with those failures that defines you as an organisation.”
Content on this page is paid for and produced to a brief agreed with Hiscox, sponsor of the Adventures in Business hub on the Guardian Small Business Network.
