A tween clothing and lifestyle brand came to The Garage Group with a renewed focus on innovation. Their desire was to begin building lean innovation capability throughout senior leaders of their team in order to drive that capability and thinking throughout the rest of the organization.
While several team members had been trained specifically in Design Thinking from Stanford’s D-School, and others in the group had been reading foundational books on similar entrepreneurial methods, the team was looking for a way to more clearly connect the dots between theory and application. The brand’s innovation leader, along with The Garage Group, worked to develop a customized training to set the tone for their new innovation processes and inspire change.
A week before Black Friday, 22 members of this retail team – managers from Merchandising, Trends, Finance, Brand Strategy, HR, Marketing, and more — converged and engaged in the interactive training. Coaching included high-level overviews of TGG’s Lean Growth Playbook and Design Thinking, and a more in-depth training in Empathy, Jobs to be Done, and Business Model Canvassing.
Throughout the training, The Garage Group guided the team as they built empathy for one another and their target market, successfully translated real customer “pain points” into Jobs to be Done, and developed real innovation pipeline ideas for the company leveraging a custom Business Model Canvas.
For The Garage Group Team, working with this brand was a great reminder of why we train through real-time application. Through the immediate application, adoption and understanding of entrepreneurial methodologies take place at a much higher rate and “sticks” with the team in an impactful way. For example, while many of the team members had been reading a popularized book on Jobs to be Done, they were still having a difficult time translating it to their day to day work and understanding the best way to truly apply it in their roles. For many of the client teams we work with, this lack of clarity is not uncommon.
But through the in-depth Jobs to be Done training, things started to click. The TGG leaders presented specific external examples of translating the “pain points” into Jobs before turning it over to the smaller sub-teams to work through translating their own external “pain points” into Jobs. After coming together as a group to discuss, the sub-teams then had another opportunity to put the theory into practice by translating real-life “pain points” from the brand’s own customers into business-relevant Jobs to be Done.
One team member was especially transparent about how the training really helped her bring the theory to life. “While reading the book about Jobs to be Done, it has been hard for me to grasp. Actually putting the theory into practice made a huge difference.”
At The Garage Group we’re always big on expanding our reading list, but just because you read the book doesn’t mean that implementation of the business will come easily. The disciplined practice of applying theory to via real-time application using both external and internal categories and examples is the key differentiator between surface level knowledge and deep understanding.
It’s this type of investment in hands-on training and adoption of lean innovation capabilities that will position this lifestyle brand to remain relevant.
Read our blog to learn more about Jobs to be Done.
