In the face of a rapidly changing marketplace, leaders at Worldpay had a strong desire to sustainably explore new areas of strategic growth that would push the company beyond its current core business and predominant M&A growth strategy.
Given the uncertainty in the market, their leaders recognized the need to leverage a hypothesis-driven approach to discover new sources of growth.
They also wanted to build an entrepreneurial culture to sustain these efforts, along with injecting entrepreneurial leadership talent back into the core business. While Worldpay possessed strong leaders delivering with excellence on the core, many of these leaders lacked exposure to the process, skills & tools, and entrepreneurial mindset to tackle emerging challenges. The Garage Group partnered with Worldpay to build the capability for sustainable, strategic exploration of disruptive, high growth areas for the business, while simultaneously advancing six key growth initiatives for the business and starting the journey of an entrepreneurial transformation of their culture.
APPROACH
With the strong support of Senior Leadership, a cohort of 12 Product Leaders over 12 weeks jumped into the intense, five-phase Lean Growth Bootcamp, immersing themselves in a world-class process for hustling like entrepreneurs, along with defining disruptive opportunities, exploring new possibilities and leveraging an efficient, hypothesis-driven approach for building, testing and learning against major growth opportunities.
Each of the five phases of the bootcamp contained foundational knowledge backed by immediate, initiative-level application, practice, and coaching to drive understanding and to produce real business results. The Garage Group team led, taught, and coached the leaders along the way.
Over the course of the Lean Growth Bootcamp, leaders tackling strategically important business challenges in two-person teams, learned to hustle like entrepreneurs via exposure to competencies like operating with a growth mindset, maximizing the assets available to them, as well as connecting their personal “whys” to the mission of Worldpay.
At a macro-level, they were exposed to The Garage Group’s Lean Growth Playbook, driving strategic context and understanding for the entrepreneurial value creation process, showing the interconnection between approaches like Design Thinking and Lean Startup.
Next they learned how to define disruptive opportunities via Design Thinking, empathy, secondary research, consumer pain-points, and Jobs to be Done.
They then learned how to explore the possibilities within their strategic direction - leveraging trends and analogs around the Jobs they were solving for, considering multiple strategic directions, and thinking expansively about assumptions using a “what must be true” mindset, and quickly building context for moving each direction forward.
Next, they learned how to identify the riskiest assumptions behind their ideas, and built out MVP prototype(s) to test ideas transactionally, and leverage validated learning to determine whether to double down, continue exploring, re-vector or shelve ideas.
Closing the bootcamp with a bang, they also learned how to pitch to Senior Leaders via foundational pitch training and storytelling, and through war stories from battle-tested entrepreneurs. Senior Leaders were blown away by the progress the teams made in 12 short weeks, along with the quality of the thinking behind the ideas.
IMPACT
Through this engagement, The Garage Group and Worldpay created a repeatable approach for innovation and growth (process + tools & competencies + entrepreneurial mindset), produced six disruptive opportunities for the business, and forever impacted the leaders who were part of this initial Bootcamp, enabling them to take these transformative approaches back to their core organization for significant impact. Leaders from Worldpay’s initial Lean Growth Bootcamp reported having significantly more confidence in the application of the techniques and mindsets. They reported feeling more confident bringing customers to the forefront of the conversation and more able to regard external forces affecting their industry; and they have a strong desire to repeat the process in order continue their growth in entrepreneurial leadership.
As we completed the initial Bootcamp, we couldn't help but be very impressed with the Worldpay team’s courage to keep pushing and learning through application in the face of uncertainty, the courage and ability to either double-down or pivot after testing early-stage ideas, leadership's investment of both time and resources, and ultimately for the passion and hustle their leaders exhibited for figuring out new ways to add value to for their clients.
