Hoe bedrijven onderbrekingen in de groei kunnen voorkomen

Tot voor kort beschikten gevestigde ondernemingen over alle voordelen ten opzichte van startups als het ging om het stimuleren van groei. Ondernemingen hadden een hefboomeffect in kanalen, enorme marketingbudgetten, sterke merken en de koopgedrag van bestaande kopers. Er was een adagium in de startup-community dat de nieuwe oplossing van uw startup minstens 10X beter moest zijn dan de oplossingen van de gevestigde exploitanten om kans van slagen te hebben.

Startups die retail, reizen en entertainment verstoren

Tegenwoordig verstoren en domineren startups gevestigde ondernemingen met slechts marginaal betere oplossingen. Van Airbnb tot Amazon worden hele industrieën verstoord door relatief nieuwe upstarts. Gegevens en experimenten vormen de kern van deze bedrijven. Jeff Bezos benadrukte het belang van experimenteren voor de Amazone-cultuur toen hij zei: " uitvinden dat je moet experimenteren, en als je van tevoren weet dat het gaat werken, is het geen experiment ." Deze cultuur van experimenten stimuleert nieuwe productontwikkeling, waardeverbetering in bestaande producten en verbeteringen in het vermogen van nieuwe en bestaande klanten om producten te ontdekken en waarde te ervaren. Amazon is nu een van de meest waardevolle bedrijven ter wereld en legacy-hotelbedrijven zoals Marriott hebben zich moeten consolideren om te concurreren met Airbnb.

De laatste verstoring vindt plaats in entertainment, waar Disney naar verluidt in gesprek is met Fox's amusementsactiva omdat Fox moeite heeft om te concurreren met Netflix .

Hoe zijn deze relatief nieuwe bedrijven zo snel groot geworden? Ze zijn verder gegaan dan alleen gegevens begrijpen, hun bedrijven reorganiseren rond groeikansen die de gegevens bieden. In tegenstelling tot oudere ondernemingen zitten deze nieuwere bedrijven niet vast in hun functionele silo's. Ze hebben hun vroege cross-functionele groeigewoonten van DNA ingebakken om gecoördineerde groei-experimenten voor de hele customer journey te beheren.

Netflix is ​​een goed voorbeeld van deze nieuwe benadering van groei. Een groot deel van hun behendige multifunctionele cultuur is terug te voeren op deze twee factoren:

1. 1Netflix was built as a subscription business from the early days. Unlike many other entertainment businesses, this meant that growth was as much a function of retention as new customer acquisition. The responsibility for driving growth extends deep within the product team, which has continuously experimented with improvements to the recommendation algorithm as well as evolving to new ways of distributing content.
2. 2Netflix was the first entertainment business to stream a high volume of professionally produced content over the internet. This gave them deep insights into how people actually engaged with content — both their own content and that produced by other studios. This further improves their recommendation algorithms, driving engagement and retention. And it has also helps their studio determine which programs to develop and fund.

Using this approach, Netflix’s market cap has now reached nearly $85B, up about 2000% since 2013.

The Cross-Functional Trap for Enterprises

Older enterprises are taking notice and are trying to replicate these cross-functional agile teams to improve growth. It is relatively easy to understand the theory of why cross-functional, agile growth teams make sense. But unfortunately, efforts to transform established enterprises always face organizational resistance.

One typical mistake is that they try to implement cross-functional changes gradually. This usually results in team members reverting back to their old siloed habits. Often this is a sign that the initiative lacked enough up front buy-in from functional team leaders.

Another common mistake is sending a single team member to a class or program to learn the theory of cross-functional agile growth and tasking them with driving the change. Rarely is the person senior enough to convince the rest of the organization to actually implement the theory. And even if they are senior enough, the majority of their time is spent cajoling functional leaders to run important experiments rather than channeling their energy into finding new growth opportunities and designing effective experiments. Even a CEO would struggle without the buy in of the broader team.

Big-Bang Approach to Agile Growth Transformation

I recommend that companies take a more deliberate, big-bang approach to growth transformation. If an incremental approach is preferred, start with a single product line. But either way, you should get all functional team leaders together in a focused offsite meeting to define a shared cross-functional vision and their respective roles and responsibilities. Trying to do it over an extended period of time leads to a gradual approach that eventually stalls.

And be prepared to challenge deeply rooted cultural norms. Outdated assumptions will need to be replaced with hypotheses that can only be validated through testing. The higher the velocity of testing, the faster your team will learn how to accelerate growth. And they will learn that many of their long held assumptions were wrong. Experimentation is a humbling experience that eventually leads to the required growth mindset of the most effective teams.

The entire customer journey should be open to experimentation. Otherwise teams will gravitate to lower resistance areas like customer acquisition, and miss the high leverage opportunities that lead to breakout growth. To effectively prioritize and execute this testing, you’ll need to adopt the same proven growth process used by today’s fastest growing companies.

While it’s difficult to jumpstart this cross-functional habit of testing, each winning experiment will help you build momentum, especially if you communicate these wins across the organization. Eventually cross-functional agile growth habits will replace the long entrenched habits that are holding back your growth.

I have developed a one-day offsite program to help Jumpstart your transformation. If you’d like an outline of this program, you can request it here. The program includes both the content you should cover and exercises for your team to begin coordinated agile growth execution.