How to pursue bigger goals
Taking bigger dreams and implementing them through clarifying value, defining a process and creating serendipity
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Last week I wrote about the need to pursue bigger goals. You’ve heard the quote “Execution without Vision is a nightmare. But Vision without Execution is a hallucination”? This week I write about how to take an idea into implementation, create a process for disciplined delivery and the importance of creating serendipity.
Creating value for the end user
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If you have a big hairy audacious goal (“BHAG”), as Jim Collins calls them, along with having defined a SMART goal to define it a bit more, the key question I’d be asking is does anyone actually want what you are about to create. I’m certainly guilty of having an idea and just launching it without testing it or design thinking it. Alex Osterwalder’s book, Value Proposition Design, has been one I’ve been savouring this week. He talks about three steps for a new product or service:
- Problem — Solution fit: does what you are creating actually solve the problem
- Product-Market fit: does the market want what you are creating
- Business Model fit: do you have an economically viable way of sustaining and (should you wish) scaling this
To help answer these, the Value Proposition canvas is a really helpful tool — looking at your customer and what you are creating:
- Customer: Who are they; What are the pain points they have (bad outcomes, risks, obstacles); What are the gains they want to achieve or the concrete benefits they are seeking
- Product / Services / What you are creating: List all of the products or services you have; Pain Relievers — how do your products/services alleviate customer pains; Gain Creators — how do your products/services create customer gains
When the value map (the side that covers your creation) meets the customer map, you have product-market fit. Even if you are creating a side-project with no monetisation plan, this is still a good exercise to refine what you know and where the engagement from the end user will be greatest. There are more materials on the Strategyzer website that might be helpful.
Discipline of delivery
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Even if you have a value proposition, a great business model canvas and a lot of enthusiasm, and especially if you are a creative (often Myers Briggs “P” types), it’s easy to get distracted. If you have a team, this may be where you begin the process of stepping back and letting others take over. If you don’t, or you are still in the early stages, this is where you need to double down and focus.
Three helpful areas of questions to ask:
- Sales & Marketing: How are we going to find and recruit users of our creation? If no-one uses it, what’s the point? How do people become aware of your offering? What gets them interested and on a journey of discovery with you? Once they are interested, how do they start engaging? And when they want to transact, how do you make that simple, effective and enjoyable? Who is going to lead this and are they the right person?
- Operations & Delivery: When you have a user who wants your product, how are you going to deliver it? What do you need to source in advance of delivering your first product? Who do you need to do what? How will you produce it and deliver it to your customer? What’s your model of customer support? Is this scalable? There’s a strong argument for forgetting about scalability until you have 1000 people using it and just do everything very manual in the short term as 1) you will learn more about your customers and 2) they will have a greater experience because they probably expect a website and are getting a human who cares.
- Finance & Strategic: How will you capture value? What’s the mechanic for payment, if any? What are the economic implications of the process? How will you track progress in sales and delivery and what are the KPIs? What resources do you need to deliver this? Who can you partner with to help you? How do you create teams that can link these three silos together for cross-functional development?
The valley of despair is a good concept to be aware of in this phase — you will hopefully transition if quickly but it talks well to your likely emotional state. If right now you are in the valley, have hope and take steps to the next place in the valley — action and momentum, when you are clear your value proposition is right.
Creating serendipity
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Serendipity — the occurrence and development of events by chance in a happy or beneficial way.
My experience is that although you have plans of how a roadmap for your creation will evolve and succeed, it rarely (never?) follows the path you originally set out.
The tactical result of an engagement forms the base for new strategic decisions because victory or defeat in a battle changes the situation to such a degree that no human acumen is able to see beyond the first battle. In this sense one should understand Napoleon’s saying: “I have never had a plan of operations.”
Therefore no plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first contact with the main hostile force. — Helmuth von Moltke the Elder
What is it that leads you to success? It’s often the left field opportunity — the distribution relationship you didn’t expect, the investor who comes from nowhere, the extra value proposition you never saw or the user who tells one million people of your offering. Is this chance? I think of it as intentional serendipity. If you have:
- Identified a clear problem
- Have developed a solution
- Have established a clear and compelling customer value proposition
- Have created a good pipeline of leads
- The customer experience is excellent
then simply by perseverance you may well find that you have success. Often the failure of businesses or projects is not having sufficient runway to take the five steps above, or not having a strong enough value proposition to start with.
Be intentional on creating serendipity by increasing the number of places this could happen. With the power of social networks, the answer to your problems may be closer than you think. This applies if you are creating a venture backed business, a bootstrapped startup or a side project that you do in the evenings and weekends for fun. If it’s tought right now — hang in there because it might just be the next email, the next call or the next introduction that brings about all of the change you need to see.
What can you do today to create serendipity?
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