Practice agile, iterative change to refine products and build company culture

I firmly believe that principles as much as products drive a company’s success. A startup may have a persuasive brand story and good public relations, but if it’s internally inconsistent — if its employees and executives cannot identify its central values — sooner or later there will be trouble.

At Heap, the analytics solution provider I lead, a defining principle is that good ideas should not be lost to top-down dictates and overrigid hierarchies. Although I’m the CEO, I recognize that I don’t always have the best view simply because I’m on top of (the) Heap. The best results come when you approach leadership like you would create a great product — you hypothesize, you test and iterate, and once you get it right, you grow it.

Most of us have had the experience of receiving a sudden decree “from above” that makes little consideration for the actual, as opposed to the theoretical, situation of people on the ground.

One-and-done decrees versus agile, iterative change

I’ve used this method in the businesses I’ve managed. The scientific method, with its cycle of observation, reporting, hypothesizing, experimenting, analyzing and reporting, is a powerful tool for product and process development.

While my process isn’t quite as rigorous as the scientific method and tends to sprint where science slowly marches, it’s based on similar principles. Before I describe the system, a warning: Although it’s a simple way to iterate new concepts and evaluate new designs, my method requires a genuine commitment to the principles of cooperation and collaboration. In an organization predicated on hierarchy and strict structure, it could be a recipe for groupthink and unearned consensus. Iteration is not, however, a justification for delay: There may be several iterations of a project, but those iterations follow each other quickly.

Most of us have had the experience of receiving a sudden decree “from above” that makes little consideration for the actual, as opposed to the theoretical, situation of people on the ground. You know the kind of thing I mean: The sales team in the saturated territory is told they must increase revenue by 20%, the already lean division is told to cut costs by 10%. Moves like this are bad for morale; they inspire resentment and cut corners. It’s precisely to avoid this kind of top-down debacle that Heap takes a collaborative and iterative approach to change.

Passing ideas back and forth

We put our business’ best minds to work to devise an initial prototype of whatever our business may need. That prototype might be a minimum viable product for commercial release, polished messaging for our forthcoming releases, or even a compendium of internal workflows.

But we can’t consider a project perfect if it’s never been exposed to the world outside the office. Whether we’re crafting a project, tweaking our messaging or establishing pricing tiers, we test in the real world. We show products to consumers, prospects and advisers, who invariably have needs that we hadn’t anticipated. The testers’ concerns may send us rushing back to the drawing board, but that’s accepted and expected. It’s the testing and refining that leads to the best product. While some businesses prefer a rush to market, we’ve observed that doesn’t work. A rushed product will frustrate users, lose word-of-mouth enthusiasm and provide an opportunity to our competitors.

But this isn’t just for product releases; we adopt a similar strategy for determining changes inside the company.

When Heap revised its core principles this year to account for recent growth and the pandemic-necessitated shift to remote work, we opted for this iterative and collaborative approach. Over the course of several virtual meetings, a committee hammered out a draft of the values document, which our leadership approved. To ensure that we’d nail the final document, we sent it to the company at large for feedback and review. The response we received was overwhelming; after considering dozens of queries and incorporating hundreds of comments, we knew we had a document that could scale.

A company, however its incorporation papers may define it, is really just a set of people. If your principles don’t reflect those people’s values, do those principles really represent the company?

Implementing in the real world

Whether you’re working in a single-room meeting or across a multinational company, business leaders have few more powerful options than to iteratively test something before scaling it up. It doesn’t even necessarily have to remain inside the company.

At Heap, we often employ a “waves” strategy of field testing. Once we believe we have something worth showing, even if not all team members fully agree on the details, we like to take a team of executives to meet Heap’s active customers or prospective clients in a four-day immersive process. In the “first wave” presentation, we introduce our tools and suggest ways they can be used. Then we close our slide deck, take out our notebooks and yield the floor to our audience. They tell us what they like, what they dislike, what they didn’t understand and what they wish that we’d included. For three days, we run two three-hour meetings a day. After a long week of long hours going all-in on a single topic, we reconvene on Friday for a concluding debrief.

My fellow executives and I hear the good and the bad news directly from the customer. Because we’re firsthand observers, we’re not insulated from our clients’ true feelings the way we might be if we’d commissioned the sales team to write a report or asked users of our platform to complete a multiple-choice online survey. After a few waves, we’re aligned, informed and ready to move ahead.

Principles and procedures

Iterative, data-based growth is at the core of Heap’s business. I mean that quite literally: When a client uses our analytics software, they’re not advised to rebuild their business from the ground up. Rather, they’re provided with concrete examples of small and subtle changes that have a substantial cumulative effect.

I’ve witnessed occasional game-changing eureka moments, but they usually occur when we’re looking for something else. If I were to examine all the remarks that Heap employees submitted to the values committee after we released our prototype document, I’d be hard-pressed to find a single “key” or “pivotal” submission, but the aggregate of responses guaranteed a much stronger statement that was indicative of the company as a whole, not just a few members of the values committee.

Similarly, however elaborate our internal customer personas are, a real-world wave offers insights large and small that we’re unlikely to discover in-house. Whether you’re refining your business’s output or defining your organization’s culture, a methodical and scientific approach will prove rewarding. I cannot promise instant results, but I can guarantee good results.