Customer Advisory Board Advice: Fail Slow
On our Customer Advisory Board interviews with executives we often hear the following comments from clients:
“Speed is the currency.”
“We need to build this so we can drive experiments and fail fast.”
“Scale is the challenge.”
But as we explored these three areas further with some of the Board advisors, we learned the following:
“Speed leads to too many mistakes.”
“Failure is really expensive.”
“Experiments aren’t designed for scale.”
In reaction to these observations, one Customer Advisory Board member suggested that perhaps we need a new goal of failing slowly. She went on to explain that in her industry, failure is extremely expensive. Instead of ‘running fast and breaking things’ her team developed a model that requires all experiments to be designed for scale. This inevitably slows the teams down a bit, but the results moved her team out of pilot purgatory to successfully scaling experiments. In 2020 consider new models and approaches to help you get to scale and speed—you may find that to get there slowing down a little helps.