This is part four of the series. Feel free to start here, or go back to start with Part 1: Embracing Uncertainty, Part 2: Assessing Risk vs. Opportunity, or Part 3: The Risk of Not Doing.

Welcome back! You’ve taken some critical steps that have moved you from the unknown to pushing forward in your organization’s growth initiative. If you’re still scared, that’s normal — it’s still the unknown. But here’s where we will establish metrics that will create certainty. If you have a strong plan in place for quantifying what you are learning within your realm of the uncertain, you are going to de-risk your initiatives significantly. Measurement, as inputs, propels our understanding of the potential outcomes of the decisions we make.

No matter what your role is in your organization, your objectives have to be tied directly to overall business impact to drive long-term growth. Too many companies get sucked into “feel-good” numbers like — impressions or how many “likes” a social media post attracts. These are vanity metrics, they do not measure what matters. Do website visitor increases convert to demos booked or shopping cart conversions? Did social engagement drive an uptick in new customers or average cart value? Or, are they just numbers obscuring a less obvious truth about the health of your company?

As strategists, we use as much evidence as we have to decide how we pursue growth. And that requires measurement. So, what are we measuring and why?

KPIs vs. ROI

KPIs or key performance indicators show how you are performing against goals. KPIs look forward, providing short-term organizational health insights that enable leaders to optimize performance along the way.

Some of the KPIs we measure:

• Lead-to-customer conversion rate
• Customer lifetime value
• Customer retention rate
• Viral quotient
• Net promoter score

In a vacuum, each of these only tells one view of a success story. Looking at them all together helps piece together a picture of the value you are delivering to your customers — where patterns of opportunity for optimizing and delivering greater value begin to emerge.

ROI or return on investment looks back at the bigger picture. ROI measures the value we are creating for the organization. Some organizations define value as bottom-line revenue. For others, it might be a robust product pipeline. Others still, may define value as failing fast enough to minimize investment risk in new ventures or innovation pursuits.

Part of what you’ll need to align on with your team is how you define ROI. Then, you’ll need to make sure you have a plan in place for collecting, analyzing, and executing your data insights. It isn’t easy to assess either KPIs or ROI without reliable data. Even if your organization isn’t ready to make your data actionable, start collecting data now. It’s easier to create a plan and make sense of historical data if you have it, rather than to start from nothing once you’ve decided you are ready.

Ok, here’s where we talk about actually achieving your ROI.

At Three Five Two, we’re a team of designers, developers, technologists, researchers, marketers, strategists, and within all of us, we have a few shared passions:

• Data: we want evidence to suggest we’re “doing the right thing”
• User-centered: we aspire to create solutions that solve problems for people
• Fastest path to validation: lean is in our blood, which means whatever helps us arrive at the future together fastest, is where we want to be. And that future is always about the next decision to drive growth, even if that means killing it. That will drive growth because it ceases to be a drag on resources to focus on something else.

There are many “ways” to get to revenue. Which way should we take?

1 — Highest Product Confidence; Slower to Market — Conducting rounds of qualitative research to validate hypotheses we have until we feel confident that we know both the problem to solve for people and a solution that meets that need or…

2 — Moderate-High Market Confidence; Slower to Market — Running marketing and advertising campaigns in-market to measure interest in a product that doesn’t exist yet or…

3 — Highest Risk; Fastest to Market — Quickly building a digital product for consumers to use immediately and marketing to a small group of them for a pilot.

Each of these is a valid route to market on its own and in combination with each other. Since every initiative is different, we must understand their use because they are all within the front-end of innovation or the product life cycle.

Getting meta: Let’s unpack this blog series

So let’s stop talking and start doing. There’s a few grounding tools I want you to use which serve as the foundation for your thinking. We’ll use the premise for this article series to talk through the various tools.

1. The Who, What, How

These three elements are your “controls.” Generally, in the beginning of any work to find something new, all three of these are unknown and therefore you have to take a leap of faith on each. To be real specific, my who within this article series are: Product & Digital Leaders, Marketing Leaders, Innovation Leaders, and General Managers.

The what is the definition of the problem we’re solving for.

In this case, the what for the 4 personas above, is that it’s difficult to make major business decisions due to a lack of confidence from evidence. And the larger the opportunity, the higher uncertainty, therefore these leaders feel the tension between their responsibility to find big growth and to assess the risk vs. opportunity at the same time.

And finally everyone’s favorite, the how …

which is your solution to fix this. In my case, I’m providing a framework we use to navigate the uncertainty, by providing a structure to uncertainty. By identifying and defining your unknowns, creating a plan for converting them into knowns, we reduce our fear.

Said in a much simpler way, “If I can identify exactly what I don’t know, it’s easier to create a plan to understand them. And if I can understand them, I can make a decision about what to do next.”

So let’s pretend An example — if you’re in the automotive industry, your who is: customers who buy cars. Your what is: how painful the process to purchase a car is… that’s enough to begin. Because, in the beginning, you may not know any more than that. In fact, it’s almost better that you don’t have a how early on; it’ll blind you to the problems you’re actually trying to validate through this experience.

2. Learning Agenda

Once you’ve defined your who and what, that’s enough to create a learning agenda. It’s an artifact you might recall from Part One — where we define all of our assumptions, unknowns, and hypotheses. Once an entire team defines these objects on the board, as it were, you now have to assess how important it is to learn about each of them and how uncertain the team is about each.

I mention this step again because of its role in the success of your team and your product. Why? No matter what your organization’s comfort level with risk and uncertainty, you have to keep an eye turned toward what you need to learn. This is especially true if you base much of your approach on assumptions to get to market faster.

After your team has mapped its assumptions, unknowns, and hypothesis, have your team dot-vote how uncertain each is and how important it is to learn each. This should help your team use the best knowledge available in the room to focus on what to learn. And like I described before, this process quickly exposes any misalignment that exists in your team.

There isn’t a sweet spot that says you should focus on three of these statements vs. 10. Still, when you cluster them together by subject matter, you should begin to see many topics emerge. I might advise focusing on less than five to start. You’ll begin to see how good your team is at keeping the work focused, and it will be evident by how much you can get done during a time with research participants.

At Three Five Two, we start every project, whether research, development, marketing, data, or business strategy, by co-creating this Learning Agenda with our clients. It is one of the first exercises that bonds our teams together, displays how everyone thinks in the room, and exposes what is generally important to each team member. It’s an excellent opportunity to develop empathy for each other and provide greater clarity on what your team wants to accomplish together.

3. Keep it Short & Keep it Light

In the most straightforward framing, think about this through the lens of knowledge vs. time. There are numerous ways to get something to market, and no way is really “wrong” if the goal is to learn. You will learn something no matter what.

Many companies conduct little to no research and instead take the path of solutions-thinking. They create an entire idea conceptually, write a functional requirements document and have a team build their concept. Three, six or even nine months later, they’ve built a solution. That’s one path to market. But those companies may not have any certainty that the market desires their product.

Guess what? I can create a low-fidelity paper prototype to test if that same “concept” meets a user’s underlying need in less than a week.

If it were me, I’d rather speak with six people in a week than spend six months developing a product no one’s ever used. That’s the tension we’re talking about when balancing speed to market with risk and uncertainty.

Ok, so you told me a lot about research, but when do you get to a lean digital product or marketing campaign?

I already did.

Here’s the deal, the structure of:

• A documented list of unknowns, hypotheses, and assumptions
• How uncertain and important they are
• The length time time you want to spend learning
• And how deep the learnings you need are…

…are exactly the same way to think for a low-fidelity prototype and research sprint, a lean digital product or a marketing interest campaign.

So, whether you’re running a research experiment, creating a product, or even doing a test marketing campaign to receive some feedback at scale, you can easily gain certainty about what you want to accomplish.

Yesterday, you spoke with exactly zero people. Today, you could talk to 10, or 20, or 1,000 in whatever format you choose. All of our decisions come with implications.

The length of time it takes to gather evidence to support a confident business decision is equal to the uncertainty you and your team feel.

So, it all comes down to what’s critical to learn, how much time do you want to spend on learning it, and how much “quality” does your process need? Quality is synonymous with fidelity and in this case, here’s a great way to think about it:

Do I need to build an entire restaurant to learn if this will be a successful business?

Or, could I create a sample of my food and give it away to people on the street?

Or, could I make a menu and ask people what they think about it?

This mindset should be taken seriously as it relates to a new product, service, or business model. You can learn a lot, with something as simple as a menu.

Make sense? Sure, in each of these scenarios you may lean on “Lean Startup” to create a minimally viable product, or Traction Marketing to craft specific channel-based experiments, but ultimately that’s not what I’m here to teach:

Suppose you can accept that it’s possible to learn from your customers with different depths of confidence, fidelity, and time invested. In that case, I hope I opened your mind to the idea that all of these paths represent the response to your user or customer’s problem. And the faster you learn and repeatedly validate their response to your solution, the quicker you’ll know if you have uncovered a new growth opportunity for your business.

Now, let’s get together and make it happen.

I appreciate your time reading this series of posts. It’s a lot to digest, but my hope is that I may have changed the way you think about moving from zero to ROI. I also hope I’ve lived up to my team’s standard of what they jokingly call the PLF (the plain language framework).

This work is full of buzzwords, academic sounding nonsense, but them the breaks sometimes.

If you want to chat more about any of this, shoot me an email at rberris@threefivetwo.com. Good luck.

Robert Berris is EVP and Managing Director of Three Five Two where he leads company strategy and day-to-day operations.

Originally published at https://www.threefivetwo.com on April 1, 2022.

A Decision Making Framework for Innovative Leaders, Part 4: Going from Zero to ROI — Three Five Two was originally published in Three Five Two on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Go-to-Market Canvas is a tool our teams at Three Five Two developed for visualizing and aligning on taking new products and services to market. Our product managers, marketing strategists, and data analysts have used it to launch products for Fortune 500 companies and startups alike.

What is a Go-To-Market Strategy?

You’ve built a product or a business or a suite of services to meet a specific market need. But you haven’t yet launched that product to the world. This is where a go-to-market strategy comes in.

A go-to-market strategy helps start-ups, new ventures, and established companies think about taking net-new products and services to a market that may not yet exist or is still in its infancy. A strong GTM strategy will go beyond just outlining a target audience, marketing plan, and sales strategy — it will reveal the overarching strategy that will give you a competitive advantage in your particular market.

“One thing that’s missing from the traditional Business Model Canvas is the question, ‘Does my product/business model enable competitive advantage that will enable you to win in the marketplace?’ To me, that’s a key question to answer, but one that often gets overlooked,” says Steve Borengasser, Business Lead at Three Five Two.

Gaining a competitive advantage, getting on the fastest path to product-market fit, and laser focusing on how to capture revenue from your target audience is always our goal when working with our clients at Three Five Two. Our Go-To-Market-Strategy Canvas is what helps us get there.

Why use the Go-To-Market Canvas?

The Go-to-Market Strategy Canvas is your guiding star: a living, breathing document that will evolve as you test and learn. Its job is to align all your internal stakeholders around what you want to accomplish and what you need to consider when bringing a new product, service, or venture to market.

“One of the number one barriers for us to getting products into market isn’t pricing strategy, or not understanding your target market — it’s getting internal alignment and buy-in of our launch strategy,” said Jess Larson, Director of Product Management at Three Five Two. “Tools like the Go-to-Market Strategy Canvas are so critical because they force us to put words to our assumptions and ideas. So many times we get in a room with teams who think they’re on the same page, but once we make our ideas explicit, it becomes really easy to see where misalignment exists, from an executive level all the way down to the execution team.”

The Go-to-Market Strategy Canvas doesn’t provide every detail about your marketing execution plan. You’ll design those pieces after you’ve achieved internal stakeholder alignment on how you will market using this canvas.
For the best results, pair your go-to-market strategy with a Learning Agenda outlining what you need to learn about your customers, market, and product adoption once in market. for a free template of Three Five Two’s Learning Agenda.

Who should use this canvas?

Startups, SMBs, Mid Market, Enterprise New Venture. Product teams, Marketing teams, Business teams. This tool is for everyone.

Getting Started

The Go-to-Market Canvas focuses on three core areas:

(1) your business model and the value you create for your market; (2) your go-to-market strategy, position, outcomes, and how you’ll measure success; and (3) Pirate Metrics framework for understanding and planning your customer journey at each stage of the marketing funnel.

When filling out the different areas, remember, this needs to be based on the work your teams (product strategy, research, design, development) have done to get to this point.

Your canvas should be:

• Easy to understand
• Focused — think phrases, not paragraphs
• Flexible — can you quickly pivot as you learn?
• Customer-focused and informed by both qualitative and quantitative data
• Connected — show how the pieces of the model work together

Fill out your own Go-to-Market Strategy Canvas Template in Google Sheets.

Business Overview

The left side of this section focuses on your business or product and its market position.

The right side of this section focuses on our customers or users and how we might think about understanding and defining them.

Marketing requires a fundamental understanding of your business strategy and goals, and your go-to-market strategy needs to align to that higher order.

Market Need

The problem we are trying to solve.

In this section, you need to answer the What, the Why, and the Who. What’s the important/urgent/frequent problem we are solving? Why does this problem exist? What’s the opportunity and the trend creating the opportunity? Why is it happening? Who is the market we are serving? Is this a new market? An existing market within which we need to differentiate ourselves? Such a critical step, but product teams often build stuff no one wants or requested. Be clear on what needs you are solving.

Value Proposition

This is the value of the product or service we deliver, from its benefits to how unique our differentiation is in the market.Each customer segment will likely have its specific value proposition based on the particular need you satisfy. It’s why they buy or will buy from you. For example, Slack’s value prop is: “All your tools in one place”. Uber’s value proposition is clear and concise: “The Smartest Way to Get Around.”

Competitive Landscape

Your company’s position relative to its competitors.
Knowing where gaps are in the market or underserved audiences your product or service fills is the most important thing about understanding your competitors. Consider how much market share is available for the taking and from whom you need to take it. This information will help guide how you position your brand.

Pricing

Our product’s price point relative to the market and competitive landscape.

Pricing is part of your competitive and positioning strategy. You may choose to be a low-price leader or a high-end value play. Your pricing strategy needs to be tied directly to an understanding of the customer segments you are trying to attract and serve and what they perceive as the value of the product or service you provide.

Customer Segments

The users or customers you serve (ideal & actual).

Define the different segments that will benefit from your product — that may include your customers’ customers. Hypothesize who is most likely to be an early adopter of your product vs. a long-time user. If you are marketing a new product to an existing customer base, do you know your most frequent customer? Are they your most valuable customer?

Channels

How do you communicate with your customer? How do you deliver the value proposition? These are the touchpoints you use to interact with customers to deliver value. That may be through owned channels (stores, salesforce, website) or partner channels (wholesaler, affiliates). You should also start thinking about how customers want to engage with you leading up to a purchase decision, i.e., marketing channels such as search ads or display or paid social media.

Customer Relationships

Buyer journey with the company.

What type of relationship are you establishing? Map the customer journey and how we interact with our customers at each step. How do they find out about us? Make their initial purchase decision, eventually by from us. How do we keep them? How do we manage them?

Customer Pains

What user pains does our product solve?

We often talk about Jobs To Be Done or the job that our customers or users hire our product to do. So what are the pains that our product or service solves for them? And what are the friction points between them and getting the job done? These could be previous experiences, emotional or mental responses to their problem or the risk associated with solving it.

Customer Gains

What does a user gain by using our product?

These are the benefits that delight a customer when using your product, increasing the potential to adopt your value proposition and convert to a user or customer.

Go-to-Market Strategy

This is the fun part. All of these pieces align your team and your internal stakeholders to the highlevel plan for going to market. This section may feel most familiar to many marketing practitioners.

Go-to-Market Overview

What do you intend to learn? How will we go about learning it? Why did you select the channels you did? What is our timeline for learning? Why are we starting where we are in the funnel?

For example, “The focus of NEW VENTURE’s go-to-market strategy during the first six months after launch will be to refine how we communicate our value proposition, drive sufficient traffic to enable product iteration, and learn more about our users. We will engage and acquire users through a series of small iterative experiments in the most promising traction channels. At the end of the launch period, we will have identified several successful traction channels and consistently be seeing first-time users complete the PRODUCT SPECIFIC experience.”

Goals

What should our go-to-market strategy accomplish?

KPIs

High-level metrics to measure our go-to-market strategy.

Primary Digital Channels

Tablestake channels we use for experiments given certain types of accounts, industries, etc.

Key Messages

What are the key messages we’ll use to move users through the various stages of the funnel?

Creative Direction

What emotion should our creative evoke? Should our creative inspire action?

MarTech

What stack do we have? Where are our gaps? How is data orchestrated across tools?

Pirate Metrics Marketing Funnel, aka “AAARRR!!!!”

This section provides deeper details about how you plan to move customers and users through Awareness >> Acquisition >> Activation >> Revenue >> Referral >> Retention funnel. For each stage, outline your Learning Objectives, your Traction Tactics, and your Growth Metrics.

Topline goal for each stage:

Awareness

Interrupt potential customers in market for a solution our product provides

Acquisition

Educate and acquire new users

Activation

Optimize funnel for users to meet our definition of activation. That ‘a’ha’ moment where consumers understand your value.

Referral

Get users to share their experience, refer friends and become brand advocates.

Retention

Create brand loyalty for repeat usage of our product.

Revenue

Ensure users are converting on purchases or paid services.

Learning Objectives

These derive from your Learning Agenda or test plan. Design your marketing experiments to answer these questions during each phase. Examples of learning objectives in Awareness Stage: Effective articulation of value proposition and key benefits and Refine targeting and enhance segmentation based on user data.

Traction Tactics

Traction Tactics must also align with your user or customer’s stage in the journey and ladder back to the Learning Objectives defined for that stage. Examples of Traction Tactics in Activation Stage: Email nurture series, Abandon email communications, or Retargeting.

Growth Metrics

Think about Growth Metrics in tiers. You have your primary and secondary KPIs (these ladder up to the KPIs you defined above in the Go-to-Market section). Your primary KPI will be # of referrals in the Referral phase. Secondary KPIs could be referral rate, star ratings, or organic traffic. Leading Indicators help you assess immediate progress and the likelihood of achieving your goals. Leading Indicators in the Referral phase could be survey completions, customer service interactions, or “Organic” acquisition growth.

Socializing Your Go-to-Market Canvas

You have likely tapped into your colleagues’ knowledge to define some of these pieces. That’s great. Getting early buy-in from your team will be critical to the success of your product or service launch.

Once you’ve completed your canvas, bring your stakeholders in for a walk-thru. Explain your thinking. As marketers, we represent the voice of the customer within a product team or business unit. You will need the support of your broader team in bringing both the product and the value prop to life for your customers.

This article was written by Sarah Woodward, VP Growth at Three Five Two. Sarah is a growth leader with a passion for developing new service and product offerings, building new relationships, and partnering with innovative organizations to drive transformational growth.

At Three Five Two, Sarah leads the agency’s growth strategy, determining how we respond to client and market needs, and championing our internal product innovation.

Her career spans growth strategy, public relations, marketing, sales, product, and client account strategy for global agencies and startups alike. Clients include BMW Group, Nationwide Insurance, The Coca-Cola Company, The Fox Theatre, the Center for Disease Control, UPS, The Rollins Center for Language and Literacy, Merial (now part of Boehringer Ingelheim), and Porsche Cars North America.

Sarah has been named a “Mobile Woman to Watch” by Mobile Marketer Magazine and one of “5 Inspiring Women In Tech To Watch In Atlanta”.

Originally published at https://www.threefivetwo.com on March 17, 2022.

Go-to-Market Strategy Canvas Template — Three Five Two was originally published in Three Five Two on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is part three of the series. Feel free to start here, or go back to start with Part 1: Embracing Uncertainty, and Part 2: Assessing Risk vs. Opportunity.

“What will happen if we do this?”

It’s the most common mental model associated with evaluating a new idea.

It’s a good question. But the better question to ask is what if we don’t.

Look, without taking risks, there is no innovation. If you only focus on what if we do, you will inevitably come to a conclusion that your idea will fail. Sure, there’s some scenarios where you might be able to find a path to success. But here’s what no one wants to say, it’s incredibly likely you will fail.

Every business case written argues why an opportunity was worth pursuing based on a defined investment size of time, money and resources, to achieve a certain potential return-on-investment that’s completely based on a guess.

That guess might be an educated guess. It may have more research and evidence to support why it could work, but it’s still a guess; it’s still a hypothesis. But, it’s also a strategy. And strategies depend on viewing a future state where possibility thrives. We tend to feel like strategies are certain, precise, and have confidence about where we’re marching towards. Even strategy is still a hypothesis, though.

That means, you need to stop caring about the eventual failure of your idea.

A new product, service or business venture’s success depends on your ability to assess the model of risk vs. opportunity differently. It is critical you shed all of the mental organizational constraints present in your company and only focus on what happens if you don’t do it, rather than if you do.

Lie to yourself and become an evangelist to make others believe.

Every business case centers on a future prediction. While technology is getting closer to predicting future scenarios, as an optimist, I’d like to believe the future isn’t yet written. However, this article is all about being comfortable with predicting some future state — and structuring how we think about uncertainty to pursue the right business opportunities.

When you assess risk vs. opportunity, what you’re really doing is designing an argument and creating a story about something you believe will happen in the future. It’s also about creating a vision of missed opportunity costs if you don’t act. You have to make that story so attractive and yet “reasonable” in your ask of resources, that people have no choice but to fund you. They are investing in you, period.

So my advice:

Be more than a catalyst for possibilities. Be a stimulant for others within your organization.

While you don’t have to bring a crowd of Utah State basketball supporters to get others excited (although, that might just do it) you absolutely have to be at the front of the pack. You’re trying to make others feel brave along the way. And guess what? If you’re not all-in, others won’t be either. Building up the bravery (yours and others’) is your best chance to succeed.

So then, what the hell am I solving for? Why is pursuing big growth so hard?

Because you’re attempting to make a decision and, at the same time, convince others to make that same decision. The real problem you’re solving for is comfort in the face of navigating uncertainty.

So are you going to teach me how to do this, right?
Not in this article. Read on to the next couple of articles. Next up will be about avoiding vanity metrics, and identifying the real KPI’s that will help you create certainty and achieve real ROI. By the end of those pieces, you’ll understand how to dimensionalize your business case and have the components for a compelling story.

Want help assessing risk vs. opportunity for your customers, products or business? Hi! We’re Three Five Two. Get in touch.

Robert Berris is EVP and Managing Director of Three Five Two where he leads company strategy and day-to-day operations.

Originally published at https://www.threefivetwo.com on February 25, 2022.

A Decision Making Framework for Innovative Leaders, Part 3: The Risk of Not Doing. was originally published in Three Five Two on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A 2021 bank study of 4,000 customers correlated twelve different banks to twelve attributes and mapped how differentiated customers perceived each one relevant to the others. Some attributes included how secure, trustworthy, innovative, personalized, and convenient the customers perceived each bank. The report found that customers perceive very little differentiation between financial institutions. As a new generation of banking customers enter the market, how banks differentiate their services concerning Gen Z expectations will be critical to earning their business.

Gen Z is the largest new customer base to enter the market since the Millennials, many of whom are still too young to earn their own paychecks. Their financial potential is enormous, with a record-breaking intergenerational wealth transfer from Baby Boomers worth more than $30 trillion in the coming years worth. Gen Z’s ages range from just 10 to 25, and 70% have already started saving for retirement. The median age this group begins saving is just 19 years old, the youngest of any generation by at least six years.

Attracting a new customer base means understanding their motivations and expectations. Although no demographic is a monolith, three aspects of the banking experience stand out to a typical Gen Z customer.

Three Emerging Gen Z Banking Trends

Personalized Support

A better experience, for Gen Z, means more than just moving from brick-and-mortar to a mobile app. For a generation of digital natives, the intersection of a cutting-edge interface with personalized and supportive features is critical.

Creating an end-to-end experience that customers can feel good about builds brand affinity. This group has high expectations for companies that prioritize empathy and social good. Gen Z can sniff out capitalistic motives from a mile away and are happy to switch to competitors who demonstrate a desire to listen and help them in their financial journey. As this customer base gets its first taste of economic freedom, personalized features designed to help monitor spending habits and teach them how to save their hard-earned money will stand out.

Bank of America launched its AI-powered assistant, Erica, in 2018, becoming the industry benchmark for personalized support. The product demonstrated a massive shift in motives as a prominent bank cannibalized its fee-based business in favor of customer service. Since then, the number of users utilizing the assistant has skyrocketed to over 20 million. With positive signals from the ambitious project, the bar has been set. While many banks won’t deliver at the same level, it’s clear that banks will need to prioritize personalized support if they hope to stand out.

Financial Wellness Guidance

Understanding why financial literacy is a priority to Gen Z means understanding the defining experiences of the generation. Raised by Gen X parents who came of age in an era marked by cultural and political crises, Gen Z is developing their own understanding of what stability feels like during the financial turmoil brought on by COVID, a dramatic economic downturn, and the Great Resignation.

And again, authenticity in the delivery is vital. Consider that this is a group of young adults and teenagers used to taking their advice on all subjects from experts on TikTok — and that those “experts” may have varying degrees of expertise. A generic delivery drenched in formality is unlikely to form the relatable connection Gen Zers seek.

This isn’t the first generation to face financial uncertainty, but they will be among the first to have unprecedented access to information and expert advice. There is a substantial opportunity to differentiate services by tailoring education to this age group’s specific circumstances and goals. Designing experiences that support the emotional burden typical of a recession-weathered demographic will also help banks stand out and attract Gen Z customers.

Speed & Convenience

Speed is everything today, whether it’s next-day delivery service or groceries guaranteed in 15-minutes. So it’s no surprise that this attribute ranks as a priority with any age group, but particularly with one who has never known anything different.

And true to form, the way this group defines convenience differs from the generations that precede them. While nonprofit BAI’s banking survey found that Millennial, Gen X, and Boomer consumers’ most frequent request was a clear and simple app for bill pay and check deposits, Gen Z “felt differently, citing quick transfers (57%) and faster payments (45%) as a high priority.”

“The way consumers define ‘convenience’ is rapidly changing from branch location to digital capabilities.” says Karl Dahlgren, managing director of research for BAI.”Our research indicates that organizations that aren’t actively finding new ways to meet this need are at risk of being left behind.”

Banks that adopt this mindset and prioritize it in every step of the customer journey will surely stand out.

How Banks Will Innovate The Banking Experience

Differentiation is more than just a creative marketing slogan. The experience itself must authentically deliver the value your customers are seeking, or they won’t hesitate to switch to a product that does.

This type of innovation doesn’t happen overnight. Delivering an innovative experience takes an innovative approach. Instead of basing the product strategy on business outcomes, it must be based on customer goals. Instead of making product decisions based on experience, they must be based on customer feedback. Instead of de-risking by planning extensively and mapping complex user journeys, do it with rapid, iterative testing and learning.

Customer inputs will guide the product roadmap.

To have a customer-centric approach means truly putting your customer’s priorities at the center of your decisions. Is your team actively gathering customer feedback now? If not, you must start.

“What product owners don’t realize is that their love of their idea can sometimes blind them, and they’re not necessarily focused enough on what the user wants, what the customer wants, what the market wants,” says Geoff Wilson, founder and CEO of Three Five Two.

To reduce the risk of investing too heavily in an approach that ends up failing, teams must bring the customer into the product roadmap from the very beginning. What gets your customer to you? What’s pain points are they feeling? What are their emotions telling you about their needs?

You have to go beyond a customer journey map to get this type of input. You have to really get close to your customers and talk to them.

“The customer journey is a series of processes and steps that we all know about. It’s how your business runs today. The challenge often comes from the needs you’re not addressing today. What are the user expectations, desires, or pains you have no idea about? We call this unknowable unknowns,” says Robert Berris, Managing Director at Three Five Two. “If you’re not talking to customers regularly, you’re not learning about their journeys and maybe more broadly about them. That becomes a massive threat to your organization.”

Agile processes will accelerate the speed of innovation.

Speed is a priority for your customer and their experience with your product. But speed is also crucial in how you compete with new products and features.

If your goal is to design the perfect product from the get-go, competitors may deliver a better solution before you reach your goal. To ensure your solution delivers against customer needs, prioritize learning over perfection in your go-to-market strategy. Minimum viable products allow you to quickly get ideas in market and validate decisions to iterate or pivot.

Think about how to continue learning about the pain your customers are experiencing, and keep everybody honest about what you observe when customers interact with your experience. Experiments should be designed to help validate the business model before perfecting the messaging and creative. These are really divergent points of view for many organizations used to waterfall product development.

Lean, cross-functional teams will outpace competitors.

Companies that can to reduce rigidity and siloed thinking are more nimble and innovative. According to Deloitte and MIT Sloan Management Review research, “a key advantage to cross-functional teams is enhanced access to resources such as adaptability, diverse perspectives, broader skill sets, and new ideas.”

To successfully put something into the marketplace quickly, you’re going to need a blended team throughout the whole process, garnering customer feedback and using it to inform and strengthen what you do next. People with different areas of expertise, from strategy to design to product development to marketing to research to analytics, need to come together and be accessible throughout the whole process to really fuel those quick iteration loops.

A cross-functional or blended team structure creates a healthy tension that generates valuable debate and conversation in support of finding the most effective way to bring an idea to market, find a viable business model, and make sure you’re learning the whole time.

Like generations that have come before, Gen Z presents new challenges for banks to understand and develop fresh experiences. To cater to the desires of this unique group, they’ll need to create more personalized experiences, features that authentically educate customers about financial wellness, and meet their expectations for speed and convenience.

Banks may need to adopt fresh working models they’re not naturally comfortable with to get there. To gain a competitive advantage, prioritizing customer research, agile processes, and cross-functional teams now will help them avoid falling too far behind.

Three Five Two is an innovation and growth firm. We’re business strategists, researchers, technologists, designers, marketers, and data analysts who excel at validating, building, and scaling businesses. We help industry-leading companies clarify opportunities, validate concepts, delight customers, and maximize growth.

Originally published at https://www.threefivetwo.com on February 22, 2022.

Three Gen Z Banking Trends Driving Innovation was originally published in Three Five Two on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The financial services sector received the most investment from VCs in 2021, topping $130 billion and growing 177% year-over-year. The pressure for financial institutions to hold the attention of their customers across product offerings will continue again this year. Digital disruption from fintech, big-tech, and internal innovation from direct competitors is forcing banks to scale infrastructure, expand their investment portfolio and diversify growth strategies, but not without a substantial learning curve.

A five-year growth plan for a mid-size bank now requires leadership to understand the benefits of cloud computing, artificial intelligence, process automation, hybrid physical and digital customer service, and personalized member experiences that cater to vastly unique needs.

On top of competitive pressures, the pandemic has accelerated customers’ demand for exceptional mobile experiences across retail and commercial services. Without a modern, agile approach, digital-first competitors will continue to provide compelling reasons for customers to switch all along the value chain.

In this article, you’ll learn:

• How banks can gain an advantage with autonomous product teams
• Why a shift to customer-led culture is critical for survival

Autonomous Product Teams Unlock a Speed Advantage

It’s the tired but familiar story of large, slow-moving corporations unable to keep up with innovative new market entrants. Sluggish department silos with unintentional horse-blinders on can’t adapt to changing customer needs fast enough. And because slow adaptation is what leads to industry disruption and eventually the decline phase of the business cycle, the threat is real for mature banks facing an onslaught of challengers.

Lean startups have a significant speed advantage. They can hone in on customer needs, prioritize high-impact features and optimize the customer journey practically overnight. Neobank WeBank launches up to 1,000 updates each month and takes only ten to eleven days to go from ideation to production. Meanwhile, an average bank launches 50 to 100 updates per month and takes one to two months to bring new ideas to market. Enterprises need to unlock this advantage- and autonomous product teams are a vital component.

Large companies have leveraged autonomous product teams for decades to overcome the speed gap. When combined with a lean startup approach, enterprises have an advantage over lean startups. They have more resources-dollars and people-than fintech disruptors. While an actual startup will typically have the resources to tackle one opportunity at a time, a larger enterprise can spin up multiple teams that tackle a portfolio of opportunities, increasing the likelihood of success by defending their business against disruptors and capitalizing on new growth opportunities.

We’ve helped do it firsthand at a Fortune 500 insurance company, with autonomous product teams working on multiple lines in the water simultaneously. Wells Fargo Innovation Lab, Suntrust Accelerator Studio, and Ally’s TM Studio are other prominent examples. These lean, data-informed, customer-centric teams are more than just a hip office and a kanban board. They operate on the fringe of the core business and are empowered to execute under independent oversight, albeit with a clear directive to drive desired business objectives. Within months, a small team of research, strategy, product, technology, and marketing experts can laser focus on a problem and transform how a product adds value to the customer experience.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Wells Fargo rapidly responded to a surge in digital sign-ons with new features that allow customers to request mortgage payment referrals and apply for PPP loans online. Their organizational structure enabled speed-to-market. Without customer-centric autonomous teams, the development of these value-added experiences could have been delayed significantly or missed altogether. Wells Fargo defended its position in a rapidly changing competitive landscape by listening to its customers and quickly adapting its products to those needs. Layer in automation and artificial intelligence to the applications process information, and it’s these seemingly insignificant iterations that add up to a future-facing digitization strategy.

Team makeup is another advantage modern product teams have on their side. Having experts from each discipline weigh in on product decisions in real-time is a speed multiplier and serious risk-reducer. Siloed teams may follow a wrong path or hit unforeseen roadblocks. A cross-functional team with subject matter experts spanning relevant disciplines may have more context and insight earlier in an initiative and avoid unnecessary disasters or setbacks. This cross-functional model encourages equal contributions from all departments for every decision, not just those requiring their expertise. For example, a team’s data lead can provide valuable information about setting up tracking long before the group begins making UX decisions or building an app. In a conversation about feature prioritization, a marketing lead can recommend a light user test to validate hypotheses in-market before devoting weeks of development resources.

Imagine the advantage a bank with that kind of agility would gain for an industry that services such a vast pool of unique, complex, and personal needs.

To unlock such an advantage, ensure product leaders have the resources they need and some guidelines for what you hope they accomplish. We’ve had the most success when strategic initiatives are guided with tools like a learning plan, design-sprint frameworks, and an iterative, test & learn approach.

Creating a customer-centric culture.

If banks want to keep up with shifting consumer behaviors, they will have to evolve beyond team structure. Banks will have to design a truly customer-centric culture to disrupt themselves before their competition does.

Imagine the org chart of a technology company compared to an enterprise bank. At the bank, below the CEO, you might find the head of consumer banking, head of corporate banking, head of wealth management, head of strategic planning, head of human resources, chief risk officer, chief financial officer, and managing director.

Many traditional banks claim to be customer-centric but operate under divisionally-fractured org charts that limit visibility in the end-to-end customer journey. The banks continue to make decisions based on “the way things have always been,” even though customer needs have changed. They lean on experience to guide their path forward instead of new ways to solve new customer challenges.

In comparison, at a fintech company, you’ll find a chief business officer, chief product officer, chief technology officer, chief marketing officer, head of human resources, chief financial officer, and president. The fintech company’s leadership structure doesn’t fracture based on each customer segment. Instead, the entire organization works together to adapt to customers’ needs and create a better product holistically, from acquisition to onboarding to support to sales.

The company achieves maximized profitability because it organizes itself to rapidly deliver product improvements centered around the customers’ experience, not its product roadmap. As a result, leadership speaks the same language and delivers a shared vision across the whole company.

Are we all aligned to what customer centricity looks like? Looking at the example below, which company do you consider more customer-centric? For me, the difference is noticeable, and it’s not just a design choice; it’s a product strategy decision.

You can almost imagine two very different conversations that led to two very different product offerings. One is simple and speaks clearly to customer desires. The other provides multiple confusing options, likely based on company-led beliefs instead of current customer needs. The choice between the two options is easy.

The number of challenges financial service companies face is infinite. While many may not have the luxury of transforming their org structure and culture overnight, the more companies can embrace the competitive advantages that innovative technology companies bring into the financial services industry, the higher likelihood they’ll have of survival.

Three Five Two is an innovation and growth firm. We’re business strategists, researchers, technologists, designers, marketers, and data analysts who excel at validating, building, and scaling businesses. We help industry-leading companies clarify opportunities, validate concepts, delight customers, and maximize growth.

Originally published at https://www.threefivetwo.com on February 4, 2022.

Two Capabilities Financial Service Companies Can’t Afford to Ignore. was originally published in Three Five Two on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Look at you — ready to face (and assess) risk and opportunity! Thanks again for reading — now let’s get right into it.

These are some of the secrets no one wants to acknowledge in business (Startup, VC, and Enterprise alike):

• To achieve “big” growth, you have to accept that you’ll never have enough information to ensure that your idea will work.
• Some of the best created strategies that are supported by overwhelming evidence will fail.
• New products and businesses that were based on little evidence have succeeded without any human-centered design or empathy for people.
• Most startups fail (>90%).
• Most new businesses fail within the first 18 months.
• Most corporate innovation fails.

Ok Robert, but what the hell are we supposed to do with this? Am I supposed to be energized? Are you trying to discourage me?

Stick with me — we’re getting to the point where you’re really embracing the unknown — and can step confidently into the (invigorating — yes, really) — invigorating — growth mindset and plan for your business.

Now, how to transform how you transact with your customers in as little as 60 days.

Make Braver Decisions

It’s simple, really — we can make braver decisions once we better understand the risk versus the opportunity. You need to assess each — to confidently move in a direction and build a strong business case to move forward.

Let’s define to align:

It seems straightforward but there is tension within both of these.

Tension is the conflict between a business opportunity and risk and between the objectives within them. Tension is knowing that moving forward with a new opportunity can temporarily reduce your profitability before you increase your profits. There’s tension about how your growth will affect your business model and even your culture.

Remember, tension is natural and surmountable. It’s staying in place that often puts future profits at an even bigger risk.

Want help defining business risk and opportunity for your organization? Hi! We’re Three Five Two. We help industry-leading companies clarify opportunities, validate concepts, delight customers, and maximize growth. Get in touch.

Understand and Define the Tension

So, let’s go deeper into the tension we’re grappling with. A business risk for a venture capitalist is different than it is for a head of new ventures inside an enterprise, which is different than it is for a corporate strategist, which is also different than it is for a product manager exploring new features, etc.

The risks for these individuals vary from risking political capital inside of a large corporation to a wide portfolio of investments that assume less than 10% will successfully pay off.

If you’re like any of the other leaders I mentioned above who happen to reside inside of a company that wants to explore “the new,” your company is generally designed to avoid risk. It wants employees to over-analyze decisions to prevent loss, has a chain of command to approve decisions and manage budget expenditures, an annual budget approval process predicting where you might spend dollars and what you hope to achieve through it… and the business model depends on you following those rules, to achieve success. That success is largely predicated on revenue, margin, net profit, while achieving goals supporting your mission and vision.

Your cost of goods cannot exceed your revenue stream with a healthy and mature business model. In order to find the same success (increase revenue, drive profits, retain customers, attract new ones), you can tend to follow the design of the original business model over and over again.

It might be time to break that habit.

Assessing Your Company’s Risk Tolerance

Risk Tolerance is intentionally and unintentionally designed within three areas of your company: (1) the business model, (2) your executive team who passes it on like scripture to their employees, and (3) the inherited personal tolerances of every employees predecessors, especially at the c-suite. I suspect, based on my experience with our clients, that much of the risk tolerance is inherited as opposed to explicitly stated.

Therefore, to assess risk tolerance is to explicitly discuss and define it by documenting how risk is viewed by your various stakeholders, including the executive team who may be providing permission and resources to pursue something “risky”. In short, the implicit mental model people in your company use needs to become an explicit definition, allowing for “the new,” the pursuit of substantial growth.

Try out the following framing to help define the tolerance for risk within your peer group or company:

1. Who might benefit from the pursuit of this initiative?
2. What is the potential benefit from this problem we might solve?
3. How does the solution we create benefit the company even if the idea fails?
4. When would we know if this initiative worked and how long might it take to capture its long-term value? And, finally…
5. Why is this initiative important to our company? Why does it support our strategic vision & goals? Why is it critical for us to do this now?

Answering these questions provides healthy constraints for your team to review and to start having the right conversations.

Robert Berris is EVP and Managing Director of Three Five Two where he leads company strategy and day-to-day operations.

Originally published at https://www.threefivetwo.com on February 4, 2022.

A Decision Making Framework for Innovative Leaders, Part 2: Assessing Risk vs. Opportunity was originally published in Three Five Two on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Do you think it’s time to forge a new era in your business, or at least step into a new project, your potential “next big thing?” The answer is yes — it’s always — yes. We stop evolving, we put our business at risk. But, you know that. The biggest challenge is to feel brave enough to pursue it.

Notice, I said feel. Here’s the secret no one in business wants to admit: creating a new product or pioneering a new venture is more about feeling brave than it is about knowing your idea will work. Because let’s call it like it is — no one can know if a new idea marketed to a new customer base in an entirely new market is going to succeed.

“Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It’s best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.”

- Steve Jobs

This five-part series will help. Starting is usually the most challenging part, right? But you’re here so you already have. We’ll do this together.

In this article, I’m going to show you how to structure uncertainty using five elements to help you find comfort in the uncertain:

1. Outcomes and Impact
2. Assumptions, Unknowns, and Hypotheses
3. Uncertainty
4. Priority
5. Time & Fidelity

Now, let’s unpack how to think about embracing uncertainty.

First, the hard facts that our research proves and many seasoned business leaders know, but don’t want to say out loud:

• To achieve “big” growth, you have to accept that you’ll never have enough information to ensure your idea will work.
• Some of the best-created, evidenced-based strategies will fail.
• Based on little evidence, new products and businesses have succeeded without any human-centered design or empathy for people.
• Most startups fail >90%
• Most corporate innovation fails.
• Most new businesses fail within the first 18 months.

Yet, guess what? Knowing these premises, we don’t realize we’re already embracing uncertainty. Every day we make small decisions about the future that have a wide range of implications based on data we do and do not have. Not to mention, uncertainty is a hallmark of the era we’re living in now thanks to the pandemic. We’re subconsciously, if not by force, already in the “embracing mode,” but we’re doing it with a poor mental model.

At scale, our tendency is to dismiss the stakes as “lower.” Take trying a new restaurant. The worst result is that it’s a waste of time because the food and service were terrible. The best result is perhaps a good experience, unlike anything you’ve ever had, along with a pretty sweet taste memory. We can make this decision without ever texting a friend or viewing a Yelp review. But we don’t do that today, do we? We gather little bits of evidence from sources that appear trustworthy, and we make that decision.

Want help navigating uncertainty associated with your customers, product, or market? Hi! We’re Three Five Two. We help companies create transformative growth in these areas. Contact us.

But what about decisions at work? We run workshops, lead meetings, create agendas, develop creative campaigns, develop new solutions, yet we nearly never acknowledge that this type of work might not work. Whether we have years of research to support how we go about this work (be it technique, user personas, statistical market research), or not.

We don’t question our methods because our brains don’t perceive uncertainty as a threat. For example, we don’t know that millions of other people will like a creative concept just because a focus group liked it. We don’t know if people in a meeting will be able to reach a decision, even if that meeting was designed specifically for that reason. We certainly don’t know that “how” we go about work (our technique) still works, even if many of us as working professionals are deeply experienced in these techniques.

Anxiety kicking in some? Let me offer some real-time coaching that I provide to my teams: This should wake you up.

Let the uncertainty excite you. It should propel you toward curiosity and growth. Hopefully, these ideas can help you see the uncertainty in structures you didn’t intentionally design or perhaps even inherited.

People are biologically designed to create habits and to love the security within a decision that feels safe and reliable. If a giant jungle beast with 15-foot-long teeth tried to murder you in the wild, your mental model for decision-making gets pretty simple: “Don’t get murdered. Run as fast as possible. Hide from toothed-beast.”

I urge you to reconsider all of the habits you’ve formed over the last several years and genuinely unpack how certain you are that those habits work vs. how much genuine uncertainty exists in how you’re working.

Now I’m going to reveal exactly how you can find comfort in the uncertain for yourself and with others, and how to feel as confident in uncertainty as you were with the techniques you’ve always used, yet ignored the inherent uncertainty built within them.

If you realized that a similar amount of uncertainty might exist with what you do know, you’d be able to conquer this fear, feel more confident, and make really tough decisions easier. And with that ease comes the ability to pursue the unknown in support of big growth, and frankly, a more energizing workday.

Structuring Uncertainty

So let’s get into it, shall we? As promised, here are the five elements you need to talk about, unpack and define with yourself and others to find comfort in the uncertain.

1. Outcomes and Impact
2. Assumptions, Unknowns, and Hypotheses
3. Uncertainty
4. Priority
5. Time & Fidelity

1. Outcomes and Impact (to customer and business)

Define in simple, bullet-pointed terms what success means for your initiative, and — this is key — how it will be successful for your entire organization. Avoid granular goals that are mostly about appealing to our vanity. Meaning — your outcome shouldn’t be that you identify just one component like an impressive number to throw out there as a checkmark to the initiative. Your goals and outcomes should be about how to add value — this is important to your business because it’s recurring revenue that keeps your business afloat.

If the overall goal of your initiative is about retaining users, be clear to your team that there are many ways of retaining users. For example, you could pay everyone a million dollars to stay for one year or you could create a loyalty platform that incentivizes users with a points-based system. Or, you could hire a smaller sales team, spend less money on marketing, or develop a company durability strategy that ensures you can survive, even during COVID-19.

While those are business impacts, you may also have user impacts you’re trying to create through this work. Ensure your outcome has additional implications mapped to ensure it was a worthwhile initiative. Your outcomes shouldn’t say “how” to achieve it. They instead should say, “here’s what success looks like and why these outcomes are important for us.”

2. Assumptions, Unknowns & Hypotheses

No team, no matter how long they’ve worked together, comes to a project or initiative with the same perspective. Getting alignment is critical, especially when identifying areas of uncertainty. But many working professionals skip right over this step.

Think about the bias your co-workers bring into the room. They might say they heard the CEO declare, “all mothers of three-year-olds in the U.S. want our product”, and make decisions based on those assumptions, when in reality, your company hasn’t fully captured that market.

People often inherit “evidence” from those who have clout or position and assume “marching orders” — without realizing there may not be substance to those claims.

The key is to ascertain what we know and what we need to learn. To do this, we develop a Learning Agenda. This exercise is as simple as creating three categories on a board and capturing everyone’s thoughts in the form of questions. Eventually, you’ll see patterns emerge of what your team wants to learn. You’ll prioritize them and ensure these questions are in support of your overall initiative outcomes. We’ll dig a little deeper into this one later on in this series.

3. Uncertainty

Once your outcomes/impact; assumptions, unknowns, and hypotheses have been refined and are easy to understand, it’s important to map each of them to the level of certainty vs. uncertainty that exists for each one. You can use a simple X-axis to determine qualitatively how uncertain these premises are. Chances are, the group collectively knows what they don’t know. A picture of what you must learn begins to form by simply asking the group to rank these. It may also inspire new questions that the group hasn’t answered.

Get the workbook here!

4. Priority

We now have to assess how important it is to learn about your areas of uncertainty. In the previous step, we only worked on an x-axis, mapping our level of certainty. We now leverage a y-axis to understand how vital each answer might be to our outcomes.

The purpose of this exercise is to avoid doing too much and create some healthy constraints. One of the most straightforward constraints could simply be limiting your experiments to a short amount of time, which still provides more knowledge than you had previously.

- Before we reach the end, I want to acknowledge what we’ve done: We’ve created a silhouette around a topic about which you and your team are certain. By defining each of these elements with a group of people, you’re all on equal footing. Collectively, you’re missing the answer to a series of questions. You’ve all agreed this is important to learn, and doing this work will move you closer to achieving your outcomes and impact. What this won’t do is answer everything with total certainty. But what this will do, is bring more knowns to life. And with that data, you can make more decisions: Do we learn more? Do we launch a new product? Do we kill the project? All of these are valid decisions, but without agreeing upon what isn’t certain, we’re disabling ourselves from advancing our ability to make decisions, whatever they may be.

5. Time & Fidelity

Finally, we’re talking about investment. Your team could run each exercise listed above in an hour or over several days in a co-created workshop environment.

At Three Five Two, the subject matters we tackle with our clients are often quite complicated, have a lot of unknowns, and can be deeply unclear where to pursue further. Because of that, we sometimes see clients unable to make a decision because it’s safer than deciding to go down the wrong path.

When we think about making decisions, it often feels safer to decide in these scenarios. And while that logic is entirely understandable, we see people take precisely zero of the steps above to choose to make a decision.

So, to ensure we make a decision that feels reasonable given the many voices in the room, we look to time and fidelity.

What’s inside of this:

• How much time do we want to spend learning about this topic?
• How many people are a part of this initiative?
• How much of their time is needed to achieve this?
• How much more money (be it their time or additional budget) is needed?
• And how “sure” must we be, through the results of what we learn, to make our next decision?

That last question might be the most important: What would cause us to invest further? What would cause us to kill the idea? What’s the ramification if we don’t learn “everything”?

These considerations are all in support of making another confident decision. If we spent a week vs. a month learning something, how would this impact our ability to make a decision later?

What to do with all of this

Each new idea, project, or initiative comes with much pressure. Pressure to have answers, confidence, and certainty to all the questions. Instead of getting overwhelmed, embrace the uncertainty of the moment. Use this framework to reduce the anxiety of not having all the answers.

Providing structure to topics, initiatives, etc. that feel uncertain to your team creates confidence in what you don’t know. I tell my team all the time, I’m incredibly confident in what I don’t know, even more than what I do know.

Robert Berris is EVP and Managing Director of Three Five Two where he leads company strategy and day-to-day operations.

Originally published at https://www.threefivetwo.com on December 16, 2021.

A Decision-Making Framework for Innovative Leaders, Part 1: Embracing Uncertainty — Three Five Two was originally published in Three Five Two on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Let’s assume it’s the end of 2020, and you’re heading into Q1 2021. You have a team, and you all pretty much know what you’re doing. And let’s assume it’s dawning on you that Jan 1 will be here before you know it, and you haven’t really formalized a plan for taking on next year (or quarter) by storm.

You’re not alone. For many teams, yearly planning can drift well into the year they’re planning for. As we’re all still adjusting to working from home, we can’t book a room for 8hrs and bring in lunch and whiteboard together. This year, it’s different.

Let’s be clear. The only reason we even have annual planning meetings is because it’s usually tied to financial cycles. Strategy doesn’t naturally “start” in one month or another. Buying doesn’t reset on New Year’s Eve; it’s ongoing. However, many of us are still beholden to the annual planning ritual. So here’s how to get the most out of it quickly.

First off, what do you need to get out of a planning session? If I’m a team lead, I want to know what our priorities are, how our activities will achieve our goals, and generally what the plan looks like in practice. Here is a template for how to run a successful planning session, get your team in sync and get some momentum come January. Use this as a starting point: I don’t know your exact situation, so you’ll need to take the useful bits and alter the rest.

Assumptions:

• Team of 6–7 or so.
• This year, you’ll be on Zoom.

Recommendations:

• 2 x 3hr blocks, preferably on consecutive mornings when people are sharp.
• Capture everything; don’t let it be a “good meeting” with nothing to show for it. This is about documenting your teams’ best thinking so you can use it in the coming weeks.
• Use a virtual whiteboard for participatory exercises and real time notes.

DAY ONE

:15min Intro

Briefly align on the purpose of the meetings and outcomes. Then dive in.

:30min Align on Goals

Align on the company goals. Maybe they’re top of mind, or maybe they’re less clear. But take a moment to write them down to ground the team in the greater outcomes.

Then align on your department goals. Again, if you don’t have them written down, take a few minutes to do so. … And if your team is smaller within a large enterprise department, you should also write down your team goals. Be specific. If you know KPIs, list them.

These goals can be overall evergreen goals, or they can be time-bound like annual goals or quarterly goals. Whatever makes the most sense for your organization.

The gist here is, What does success look like for Q1? Write it all down for reference throughout this work.

:30min Know your Success Factors / Inhibiting Factors

What are the factors that will help you succeed? Do you have a budget? Do you have champions and advocates? Do you have strong partners? Are there category dynamics or macro-trends that will be wind at your back? Do you have time, and unique talents? Do you have experience or learnings from last year? Discuss, and write them all down.

Now, what are the factors that will add to your challenge? Budget? Dissenters? Weak partners? Category dynamics or trends? Any big unknowns you’re facing? Discuss, and write it all down.

:05min Break

Take a bio break. You’re almost halfway through your first session.

:60min Learn from Last Q1

Do a retro; talk about what happened. If this isn’t your first year, you may have some vital learnings from last year. If you’re planning Q1, don’t do a retro of Q4 (unless there’s was a huge thing that happened that you really need to unpack). For a lot of companies, Q4 is unique, and Q1 was a long time ago. So refresh your memories, and discuss:

• What worked?
• What didn’t?
• What would/will we do differently?

Write it all down. Laugh, cry, get inspired.

:30min Preview the Coming Quarterly Calendar

Get out a visual of the upcoming calendar. Usually this is a bit of a wake up call, since you’re looking at actual dates, and you stop thinking about “next year” as some far off time frame. Q1 is 90 days long, 12 weeks. Then it’s done. So get out a calendar and talk about it. Write down every thought from the team.

• What are key days/dates for the team?
• How do you think about chunking it down? (into weeks? Months? Every third Thursday? Are Monday’s unique? Your business cycles are your own, so make note of what happens when, and why.)

Don’t start planning too much just yet. Just note the important days. That will start the wheels turning for everyone. If ideas pop out, write them down and save them.

Finally, give everyone a bit of homework for the next session (hopefully the following morning): “ Bring in one big opportunity area we can innovate in.” This will be specific to your products, or services, or hours, or delivery, or consumers, or events — this is about the work you do, and identifying exciting areas to try new things. Do not come up with solutions. I repeat, it’s important that people do not come up with solutions here. They are simply describing a part of your work that holds the opportunity to do something innovative. There’s a whole separate process for coming up with solutions. This is about finding where to push. It’s a quick exercise, but make it mandatory. You’ll use it tomorrow.

It’s been a long 3hr Zoom call. You’re done for the day.

DAY TWO

:15min Review Day One

Briefly scan over the work the team did yesterday. Don’t go into detail, but acknowledge how much ground you’ve covered. This will give everyone a reminder of what you discussed, and add continuity from one day’s work to the next.

:60min Draft Three Core Initiatives

Most teams do hundreds of things; successful teams know why they’re doing it. Use this time to discuss the activities you know you’ll be spending your time on in Q1. These can range from mundane maintenance to inspiring fun stuff, but you can predict a lot of the kind of work to come. In this exercise, the team will generate lists of “stuff” they’ll spend time on, and you’ll cluster the activities into three core initiatives they support or drive toward. You may already have a three-pronged approach to your department’s work, in which case, this is an opportunity to add detailed activities (what goes into making that happen), and perhaps re-framing or re-phrasing your buckets — adjusting them so they are fresh and make sense.

Why three? Three is simple; people can easily remember them. It provides focus. And it’s enough. If the team can create three meaningful outcomes, you’ve had a good quarter. Maybe you really need four, but see if you can whittle it down.

I have no idea what your team spends time on, so this is really up to you all to fill this list. It doesn’t need to be inspiring, but it should reflect reality. I’ll give you some examples here to illustrate the level of specificity that will be useful here, people may say things like, “managing XYZ partner” because that will take them time and it needs to be done. Write it down. Or “processing ABC paperwork,” or “training sessions,” or “sales calls,” or “desk research,” or “design,” or “RFPing (for something).” As more people mention more activities, it’s the facilitator’s job (yours) to gradually cluster them into three buckets — your core initiatives that each activity supports. Label the three lists; you can label them by outcomes, or by business line, or by internal/external, whatever works for you. Just check yourself that the labels support your goals, because these labels will stick.

You’ll end up with three columns, each with a label of the initiative name, and lists of activities under each. Set this aside, we’ll come back to it.

:05min Break

Take a bio break. Stretch.

:60min Review Homework

Finally, the fun part (hopefully). One by one, have each person share their homework with the group. The question was, “What’s one big opportunity area we can innovate in.” The ideas will come in different shapes and sizes, and that’s okay. It shows the strength of divergent thinking on your team. Some people might have written a paragraph about their opportunity, and some might have written one word. As people share their ideas, take notes, and gently right-size each idea. You can elaborate on the one-word answers, and you can pare down the verbose ones.

Again, this is not about coming up with solutions. If you hear someone come up with a solution — like a new product idea, or a new price point, or a new ad, or a specific new thing — don’t write down the idea. Instead, write down what the idea is working on, like “a new version of the product” or “a new pricing model” or “a new ad campaign.” You’re writing down the opportunity area, not actual ideas. That will come later.

Once all the ideas are on the board, briefly ask each person to pick their favorite (that’s not their own), and say why. Make a note of each person’s vote.

:30min Time Takers vs. Difference Makers

Now the team is going to look at the day’s work: the lists of activities in the three columns, and the list of areas to innovate. The team is going to identify the biggest “Time Takers” and the biggest “Difference Makers.”

Time Takers are activities that take a lot of time but don’t contribute much to your goals. It’s the busy work, or the clunky processes. Oftentimes these are time-sensitive and seem urgent, but ultimately it’s just a process and not creating impact directly.

Difference Makers are the items that contribute to your goals a lot. These are initiatives that you point back to after they’re done and tell your boss about. These are super important to make time for, and too often they get deprioritized in the moment, especially if they don’t have an immediate deadline.

Each person on your team takes four dots (or stars, or emojis) — two green and two red. The drill is this; each person independently evaluates the items you’ve generated and listed today, and puts a red dot on the two biggest Time Takers. They can put a dot on an item on either of the two lists.

Then each person independently picks out the biggest Difference Makers, and puts a green dot on the two items they think could make the biggest difference toward your department goals.

At the end of this dot-voting exercise, you may see some themes. Maybe there’s a cluster of red dots around a couple of items. Maybe there’s a cluster of green dots around a couple of items.

Ask each person what they put dots on and why, two minutes each. This drill should help you all align around how to spend your time in the coming quarter. Maybe you find a way to automate or accelerate the big Time Takers. Maybe you put weekly meetings on the calendar to work on the biggest Difference Makers. The team can work to address each:

• How might we minimize effort on Time Takers?
• How might we maximize effort on Difference Makers?

:30min Assign Next Steps

• Make a radiator (a sign within perpetual view) of your company goals, team goals, and three core initiatives
• Assign 2–3 people to work on the Time Takers (reduce) and Difference Makers (increase)
• Assign 2–3 people to work on the Success factors (create or amplify) and Inhibiting factors (reduce, mitigate or eliminate).

That’s it! Two meetings, and you’ve covered a lot of foundational planning to make the coming quarter a success. Let’s check our work. What have we planned?

• What the priorities are
• How the activities will lead to the goals
• Generally what the plan looks like in practice
• Assigned action items to keep the ball rolling

Get your template here:

This template doesn’t give you a sequence of meetings to execute. It doesn’t give you a list of activities to prioritize. Those things will be different for every team. What this does give you is a process to quickly map activities to goals. It gives you some specific ideas for exercises that will accelerate your planning sessions — take what works for you. It gives you the power to orient your team’s effort toward clear value creation.

If you want to tailor an approach for your team, we can facilitate, just give us a call or shoot us an email.

David Yeend is a Director of Innovation at Three Five Two. He’s an INFP, identical twin, and lover of indie rock, living in Atlanta with his wife and two children.

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Originally published at https://www.threefivetwo.com on December 15, 2020.

Jump Start Your Annual Planning Meeting was originally published in Three Five Two on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When it comes to the Next Big Idea, there’s no shortage of insight about ways for teams to ideate. Do a search for “best way to generate ideas” and you’ll find the likes of Inc, Medium, LifeHack, MindTools, Canva and a host of other sites pitching tips, tools, habits, processes-and promises-to get you there.

I’m not here to dissuade you from trying them out-heck, anything that sparks imagination is useful in my book.

But there’s an important thing to consider the next time you jump into a brainstorming session: generating lots of ideas isn’t the same as generating even a few good ideas. The good ones, I’m sure most of us would agree, are pretty hard to come by.

Why is that?

Our Own Worst Enemies

One obstacle-and a bigger one than you might think-is we just get in our own way. We can’t help it. While it may seem like we’re wading into new, uncharted territory while brainstorming the next new thing, we’re also dragging along some serious baggage: the limited perspectives and inherent biases we all carry-into our thoughts, into the room and into the discussion.

The result? In spite of our best intentions, we’re likely to unknowingly sway creative thinking in one direction or another, ask leading questions and miss the gems buried below the surface. We might like to “leave our biases out of the room,” but that’s a tall order when we’re not very conscious of them in the first place.

So what’s the answer? How do you break free of traditional thinking and create breakthroughs that really matter-to you and to your customers?

The answer is simple in concept, fairly easy to apply, and something you can start using today: Clean Language.

Clean Language?

No, I’m not talking eliminating your expletives; Clean Language is a precision inquiry technique-a set of questions and a way of asking them-that unleashes profound, truly meaningful thinking.

Created by New Zealand psychologist David J. Grove, Clean Language (CL) is used in counseling, therapy, coaching and now, more and more, in innovation. CL helps us help break free from the boundaries of “ordinary” thinking by understanding our deeply rooted disposition to think and speak in metaphor.

Speaking in Tongues

This might sound crazy, but the average person uses an average of six metaphors per minute! Some are as plain as the nose on your face, but others are quite subtle. Give that notion a few extra brain cycles and I bet you’d agree-metaphors almost everywhere, hiding in plain sight.

You see, our brains are wired to seek out reliable, repeating patterns in order to make sense of the world, then use those patterns to think and express ourselves to others. This is so deeply ingrained, we even respond to physical metaphors, like becoming friendlier when drinking a warm beverage, or slowing our pace because we hear words that remind us of “old people.”

It only stands to reason then, that we respond to other people in the same way; their metaphors very much influence the way we think. In that sense, it’s very easy-and common-for any of us to unintentionally “lead the witness” when we engage with others.

Unmuddying the Waters

Clean Language enables people to think for themselves by eliminating metaphors in the questions we ask (hence the term “clean”) and, at the same time, help them get past their own biases and blockers.

Moreover, CL isn’t even really about language; it’s mostly about listening! By drawing from a pool of questions ( about twenty, all told), listening intently to the responses, then drilling ever deeper, you can bring very profound thinking to light.

How to Get Clean

The full breadth of Clean Language is beyond the scope of this article, but you can get off to a running start with just two questions-what CL author Judy Rees calls “ Lazy Jedi Questions.” These two queries are the ones used most often, and, at Three Five Two, we’ve seen them elicit very dramatic results.

• What kind of X?
• Is there anything else about X?

By looping through these two questions, honing in on the metaphors that sound “interesting” or “important,” and using their language (not yours), you can use CL to help people narrow to the essence of what’s truly on their mind (and in their heart). The results can be remarkable:

• Better clarity
• Deeper thought
• Broader ideas
• Reduced bias and prejudice
• Absence of assumptions
• Fewer misunderstandings

Less is More

So, the next time you need a big idea, remember to keep things clean. Don’t rush in to “contribute,” injecting your own biases and opinions. Engage your team with short, simple, clean questions to dig for gold. Before you can say “Bob’s your uncle,” you’ll be on the fast track to better outcomes.

Originally published at https://www.threefivetwo.com on November 19, 2020.

Clean Language for Business Breakthroughs was originally published in Three Five Two on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Coca-Cola is a legendary company, an icon of our global culture. They spend billions of dollars a year on branding and media campaigns, driving historic growth. It’s the dream agency-of-record client for most marketing firms, but not so much for us.

This is not a Coke-bashing article. It’s about two very different approaches to growth.

Coke’s Growth Strategy

At Coca-Cola’s global scale, they succeed through incremental growth in volume and revenues. 3% growth in volume is huge for them. 6% growth in revenues is monumental.

Coke chases growth through new distribution, cost reduction, pricing and packaging adjustments, rewards programs, acquisition and…innovation. And while all these elements move the needle, they’re not aimed at what we’d call transformational growth.

As the market leader in a mature category, doubling in size or value in the near term isn’t the plan. Coke instead seeks what they call, “disciplined portfolio growth.” Their goals build on their core. And that’s perfect for them.

Compare that with some companies further down the Fortune 500 list. Some are seeking a steeper growth curve. From startups to enterprises, some companies are dedicating time and focus to that hockey stick growth line. And yes, it is very possible. As a growth agency, these are the kind of goals that get our attention and get us up before the alarm goes off to get busy. We are wide awake for this.

Three Kinds of Innovation

To create this kind of growth, a company needs net-new ideas. It needs to innovate. But not all innovation is created equal. Some cracks at innovation are close to the core business, some are adjacent, and some are transformational. What does that mean?

• Core innovations stay close to the core business, they’re incremental. They are adjustments to current operations that nudge the KPIs toward improvement — it’s that 3% to 6% range that Coke talks about.
• Adjacent innovations are a bit bolder and aim for larger rewards, either by offering new products or services to its current audience, or finding new consumers for existing products and services.
• And then there are Transformational innovations, which HBR defines as “Developing breakthroughs and inventing things for markets that don’t yet exist.” These are the things that people don’t know they want yet. They are wholly net-new ideas, creating a product, and service, and market, and model, and value, and spend.

Know What Your Company is Chasing

Coke plays in the core-slash-incremental space, and might dabble in the adjacent space.

We thrive in the adjacent space, and in the transformational spaces as well. We guide clients toward finding new markets, new models, new products and services, maximizing upside and minimizing risk.

Check out this visual, adapted from HBR/Deloitte’s A Simple Tool You Need to Manage Innovation, to see what we mean:

This isn’t a new idea. But it’s important that you know where on this chart your company is aiming to find growth. Align with your team about what kind of upside you’re seeking, and what may be potential risks. It’s even better to have a solid plan to reach the results you want.

De-Risking Bigger Swings

Transformational innovation isn’t for everyone. In the wrong hands it can take too long, and carry too many uncertainties for some companies to stomach. Adjacent innovation is more near-term, easier to find, test, and operationalize quickly — some big reasons we love playing in this space.

Here are a few tips on making it work:

• Be deliberate with your time — every meeting and workshop has a predetermined purpose.
• Move fast — you should be able to cover a lot of ground in one or two sessions.
• Go from uncertainty to certainty by gathering evidence through fast research and real user feedback.
• Get real signals of upside. De-risk new ideas with early findings, and never ask the team to blindly trust a hunch.
• Be honest with yourself about your assumptions, and how comfortable you are with your level of certainty — before spending much.
• Don’t chase buzzwords or new tech for its own sake — it’s a tempting trap.

Choose Your Trajectory

Adjacent innovation is about building on your strengths. Find an idea that is super possible, and super appealing to users. Refine it, then build it, and then launch it in the safest, fastest way possible. Transformational pursuits might seem more sexy or press-worthy, but they have a much harder time becoming real. We are looking for real, steep growth. Pursue what aligns with your business goals, culture, and climate. We never push our clients to aim higher than makes sense, and we routinely coach them down as well as up the scale. There are a lot of companies ready to get aggressive, and prudently pursue radical change. They know that if they don’t do it, their competitors might.

We love Coke. Truly can’t say enough good things about the brand, especially as Atlantans ourselves. (Personally, my go-to is Coke Zero — might even put some bourbon in it on a wild night.) Coke is absolutely doing the right things for their business, and for their stakeholders (just look at the stock’s rally since the onset of the pandemic). And, if they ever want to pursue some transformational or adjacent innovation, we have standing office hours and we invite them (or you) to have a chat. We know how we’d approach it. Quickly, safely, with eyes wide open.

Additional Sources

• The Coca-Cola Company
• Fortune

Originally published at https://www.threefivetwo.com on November 18, 2020.

Working on Coke Puts Us to Sleep was originally published in Three Five Two on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.