FT.com
By Ian Sanders
By Ian Sanders
Parallel thinking: Stef Lewandowski at
Makeshift’s studios, where work is under way on several prototypes at once to
speed up the process of developing ideas
In a set of studios close to London’s Old Street roundabout, Stef
Lewandowski and his team are working on changing how digital products are built
and tested. What sets Mr Lewandowski, co-founder of Makeshift, apart from many
of his neighbours in London’s tech community is that his business releases a
new product each month, a rate that it achieves by developing multiple ideas
simultaneously rather than focusing on one single product.
The company’s latest product –
HireMyFriend, an online recruitment platform – was conceived, built and tested
within a couple of weeks. Mr Lewandowski, whose partners in the business
include Paul Birch, co-founder of social network Bebo, says the intention is to
make 12 apps or digital products this year, some of which may scale up to
become companies in their own right. “The idea of parallelism is opposite to
the received wisdom of people in the start-up scene – they’ll tell you just to
focus on one thing, to go for just one idea,” he says.
Traditionally, a new product requires
a big investment of time and money. That is changing as the cost of prototyping
products becomes lower and lower, which means innovators can test multiple
hypotheses at the same time, putting products in front of customers in weeks
not months. Companies such as
Makeshift are recognising that they can
execute several ideas simultaneously, which means they are not only
accelerating the rate of innovation, but also trying to maximise their chances
of commercial success by hedging their bets. Now bigger organisations are
seeking to emulate start-up behaviour so they can become more adept at digital
building.
Mr Lewandowski acknowledges that
HireMyFriend is an idea without a business model so far, but says the emphasis
is on getting it in front of real users so it can be tested and adapted based
on real user experience. Makeshift is only months old but has already developed
a suite of other products, from Listerly, a list management service, to Bitsy,
a way to sell digital products online. Rather than build products on behalf of
clients, the company aims to create a product of its own every few weeks,
rapidly testing it in the market and figuring out the business model once
launched.
By prototyping in batches, Mr Lewandowski
says, the company can quickly decide which products have the potential for
commercial success and which are not good enough. “If ideas are relatively easy
to get to market you can quickly find out if something isn’t going to work, and
then kill it. It is much easier to have a small amount of money risked on
something, and then eject if it is not working,” he says.
New York-based Betaworks launched
five years ago to build products in parallel based on ideas originated in its
studio of creators and engineers. Its products range from Bitly, a web address
shortener, to Instapaper, a tool for saving web pages for later reading.
Founder and chief executive John Borthwick agrees with Mr Lewandowski’s “keep
or kill” approach. “Breakage and failure is part of our model. If we are not
failing, we are not doing our job,” he says.
Nordstrom’s lab
US fashion retailer
Nordstrom was founded by John W Nordstrom in 1901. Its Innovation Lab in
Seattle brings together designers, entrepreneurs, engineers and researchers to
generate, build and test ideas. Here are some lessons from the lab:
●Embrace rapidity Nordstrom
creates products fast, aiming to develop new ones in weekly increments.
“Through rapid iteration of customer needs – and fast validation of our attempts
to solve these needs – we can learn new insights about our customers and
incorporate them into our offerings fast,” says JB Brown, director of
innovation.
● Keep the focus on
the customer The Lab is currently testing a number of digital and physical
design concepts to help make the in-store experience better for shoppers. It
uses the approach outlined in Eric Ries’s The Lean Startup to
stay focused on customer needs.
●Think plural The
Lab develops several solutions to the same need simultaneously before choosing
the best. “As a result, it’s not a pain for us to think of multiple solutions,
but rather a thrill,” says Mr Brown.
Betaworks has developed many of its
products into companies in their own right but Mr Borthwick says building a
product and building a business require different skills. Making a business
out of a product is about forming a tight relationship between product and
customer. “Beta-testing products and our process here [avoids] the need for
market research: your product is market research,” he says “We tune it, pivot
it or kill it, we go through the cycle quickly.”
Betaworks has also made seed-stage
investments in web businesses such as Airbnb and Pinterest.
Mr Borthwick’s advice to bigger
companies looking to learn from his experience is to fast-track the process
from developing a product to getting customer feedback. “You need constantly to
treat your products as ‘betas’,” he says.
This thinking is not limited to the
start-up labs of Makeshift and Betaworks. “Any company can foster this approach
if it is willing to adopt the right process and mindset,” says Eric Ries,
author of The Lean Startup, who advocates rapid prototyping and
testing. Companies such as Philips, Walmart and Marks and Spencer have started
their own innovation labs. Similarly, Nordstrom, the US retailer, established
the Nordstrom Innovation Lab to develop ideas quickly, building new digital
products and apps in one-week increments. Mr Ries says the psychology of big
organisations can be changed with support from senior management. “Most
companies already employ a lot of entrepreneurs, but they don’t unleash their
full potential.”
One executive influenced by Mr Ries’s
approach is Corina Kuiper, a former new business development executive at
Philips and now an adjunct professor in innovation at Antwerp Management
School. Last month, Ms Kuiper spoke at the Corporate Startup Summit in Cologne,
a conference aimed at educating corporations about start-up thinking.
Having launched her own “start-up lab”
within Philips, Ms Kuiper says the challenge in the parallel model advocated
by Betaworks and Makeshift is to think how each product release can help the
next one. Using a bowling pin analogy, she says: “If you hit one market with
your first product, you need to ask how will that help you hit the next one.”
Recognising that many companies may not
want to launch their own start-up labs, Adaptive Lab of London offers to do it
on their behalf. Rather than starting with an idea for a product, Adaptive Lab
begins with a client’s business challenge and comes up with ideas to try out.
Managing director James Haycock says the focus is on developing a product that
can be put “in the customer’s hands as soon as possible; we can then know in a
couple of days if it’s going to work or not”. Clients include online retailer
Asos and the pollster YouGov.
Mr Haycock says bigger businesses
looking to adopt this approach must be prepared to experiment. “You need to
try a lot of ideas out and be prepared to kill some of them,” he says.
Back at Makeshift, Mr Lewandowski
thinks his business will be more innovative than bigger companies because of
its playfulness. “We like playing with different industries that we aren’t too
familiar with – we didn’t know anything about recruitment but we launched a
recruitment product,” he says. “We’ve proven we can do things quickly and at
high quality. The challenge is the bit that comes after the make – how we turn
each idea into a business.”
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