I help executives test strategy against reality | Co-author of Testing Business Ideas | Keynote Speaker | Podcast Host | Advisor
Corporations collect frameworks, but have a hard time stitching them together into something that makes an impact. Lean Startup is great at applying scientific method to product but it isn't about lean and not just for startups. The build measure learn loop shouldn't start with build. Once you start with build, teams rarely make it to learn. Design Thinking is great at generating empathy but rarely quantifies whether the desirability insights will ever lead to business viability. You spend way too much time on what the customer needs and then have a hard time taking it forward into a real business. Design Sprints are great but they treat validation as a one off event, pushing the validation to the end of the sprint. Some design sprints don't even involve the customer, which makes them more of an Art Sprint than anything else. SAFe is great for industrializing delivery. It looks very thorough until you realize the ideas you poured into the top of the machine were full of assumptions that weren't allowed to be validated. All aboard the release train, next stop, a product that no one uses. Each framework excels at something, but none were built to systematically extract, rank and address risk. The result is a gap between activity and evidence. Teams are busy, metrics go up and to the right, but leadership can't see if any of this leads to more revenue or not. We need to fill these gaps, now. 1️⃣ Shorten Learning Feedback Cycles - Markets change within weeks, not years. When your evidence only appears at the end of a phase or sprint, the learning arrives after the evidence expires. Create a sense of urgency in that we need to learn to make smaller decisions in days and weeks, not months and years waiting for the ultimate proof. 2️⃣ Practice Funding Discipline - Stop giving too much money to teams early on in the process. They optimize for building, not learning. They are not incentivized to reduce risk by testing. Meter your funding in tranches based on alignment to your vision and evidence provided of traction. 3️⃣ Organize Teams Around Opportunities - Don't name your teams after a solution you have in mind. Doing so will prevent the team from ever pivoting away from it, even if there is no demand for the solution. Instead organize around opportunities and give yourself permission to increase the team size once you have evidence of fit. What else would you add to this list to help stitch what works together and close the gaps for your company? ♻️ If this resonates, repost or even share this with your leadership team 🩷 Like this if you want more spicy takes from a guy named Bland.