Ever been part of a team that’s given everything to solve a strategic problem and come up short? It isn’t a lack of heart, effort, or talent. It’s simply that BigCo teams are executing from an existing playbook, not coming together to create a new one.
We helped a struggling petcare brand smartly tackle their uncertain strategy challenge by leveraging a startup-inspired approach, enabling them to move fast to market, mitigate risk & optimize along the way:
This petcare brand was experiencing a rapid decline. They needed to make bold, strategic decisions rooted in consumer insights and quickly. The team quickly needed to reboot the brand by exploring potential strategic spaces, quickly align with senior leadership, and bring new space to life. The team partnered with The Garage Group on a 5-day Strategy Sprint, to iteratively leverage consumer insights to identify Jobs to be Done, identify a new consumer target, and design, assess, and align on the best, most disruptive, strategic path forward to revive the brand. The results of this brand reset are in the market, and continue to have amazing traction with the strategic space we helped them identify. The sub-brand business is up 35%.
“When you look at all our work up on the wall, it’s incredible that we got to this level of depth in a week. You couldn’t even get this started with six weeks in the normal corporate world.”
TEAMS LEAN ON AN OUTDATED APPROACH: At a high level, teams fail when setting out to solve new problems because they most often solve uncertain strategy challenges with an outdated mindset and approach that leans on what the team knows within the current model, not what it has to learn to create a new one.
THEY FAIL TO OPERATE LIKE STARTUPS: For underperforming teams pursuing adjacent and disruptive ideas, we constantly see a gap in entrepreneurial skills and mindsets. It’s not that teams aren’t capable, they just struggle to bring entrepreneurial approaches to life in an actionable way. Not being comfortable with these new mindsets causes teams to hesitate to move forward in new ways without all of the answers.
DESIGN THINKING TRUMPS MULTI-METHOD: Teams leverage a single method like Design Thinking that often times prioritizes over-learning, and over-building at the expense of pressure testing early thinking across a number of potential paths forward.
Strategy Sprints are about taking small, but mighty teams on a journey to learn and prototype their way into new strategic options for the brand, product, or business. Teams learn their ways into what has to be true to compete in this turbulent new world, and how to do it in a way that’s building confidence and momentum.
LEVERAGE A STARTUP-INSPIRED APPROACH: Teams that are successful at solving uncertain strategy challenges recognize the need to leverage an entrepreneurial approach that gets the team super comfortable moving forward without all the answers, but confident they’re on a path to get them, quickly.
MOVE FASTER AND SMARTER: The new Strategy Sprint format enables teams to move fast against multiple paths forward, operate from a growth mindset, and focus on what they need to learn, not what they know. The right learning approach for each direction team explore starts to build a powerful narrative leadership can buy into.
CONSTANT EXTERNAL CONNECTION: Being able to move at warp speed is enabled by bringing in the right external perspective at the right times to enable the team’s progress. From consumers and customers to trends, analogs, experts, and timely connect with leadership, we help teams lean on new methods and fresh inspiration, keeping a connection to the real world throughout the process.
As you’re evaluating your portfolio going into the new year, and making plans for 2020, ask yourself: are you leaning on an outdated approach to solve problems? Could you leverage multiple methods to chart a path forward? Could you move faster, smarter, and more entrepreneurially? Our blazing fast Strategy Sprint workstreams enable teams to smartly tackle uncertain strategy challenges, enabling sometimes dramatic changes, moving fast to market, mitigating risk & optimizing along the way. See more examples of how BigCo teams have applied a Strategy Sprint approach to their challenge.
