As with any project worth its salt, the first place to start is to define the vision, goals, and metrics for the effort. This is especially salient for companies taking on product and experience for the first time at scale – we’ve got to have a clear sense of what’s happening before we do it. I recently wrote about roadmaps but want to step back a bit and talk about the work before the roadmap: the strategic goals.
The vision is something that my former colleague Seth Dobbs talked extensively about on an episode of his excellent podcast, Principle Driven Leadership. “Why Vision Matters” is the episode and basically everything I would say about it he would, too, so just go listen and then come back. I’ll be here. https://www.pdlpodcast.com/podcast/why-vision-matters/
One critical part of defining vision and goals is talking openly about failure. I’ve had the pleasure of exploring this space with multiple clients over the years but wanted to share how it helped a healthcare client. I facilitated and led a 2-day workshop that included people across marketing, IT, design, and patient experience, including C-suite folks; we had a great cross-section. After we got our intros out of the way on the first day I plunged into two big questions: what does success look like on this project, and what does failure look like? The way I positioned this was: “We’ll know we’re successful if, one year from now, we…” and the same for failure.
Everyone got 10 minutes to write down their thoughts on Post-Its. Once the team had written things down, we put them up on a board; I did a brief clustering to see the emerging themes.
The success stuff was solid. Improved NPS. Happier patients. Happier providers. More efficiency. Less IT time updating content. But being in the failure space space with them was fascinating. The biggest fear in the room was: we’ll spend all this time and money on this and be in the same place. No change. Stuck.
I wanted to learn more – I asked why this was a concern and a fear. At the C-suite level it was simple: we know we need to do better. We need to do it and show it. We need to deliver results. Pretty straightforward and understandable. But for the VPs and SVPs in the room, it was about following through with promises; the team had been burned by high-profile projects before that promised the world (digital transformation!) and delivered, well, a few interesting web components at best.
The criticality of this discussion informed the activities in the rest of the workshop and the project itself. We didn’t use the failure fears as a motivator, but we always kept them around – showing up as a refresher in every presentation, in every critique – so we could always ground ourselves in why we were there. And for success metrics, this framework gave the whole team ways to pull in quant and qual to determine how we were performing, looking at the extremes of failure and success to guide how we measured the work we did.
Ultimately, the web strategy was a success. The organization scaled and grew, and the core marketing and IT teams developed new processes and designs with us.
So when it comes to failure and fear, I’m absolutely good to dive into it with people. It’s an important part of collaboration and leading with heart.