🏆 Fail Safe
How to fall and get right back up.
“No no it’s okay, let him figure it out,” I said to Gummy, aka grandma, aka my 2-year-old son’s best friend. Jack was navigating novel drinkware and on the verge of spilling all over himself.
He continued to explore the vessel, staring up through the bottom like a periscope. A rotation left, a spin right, a slowwwww tip…and down his body went a full cup of water. He sat there stunned as I refilled the cup. Round two would be far more successful than the first. His shirt dried, lunch ended, and down for his nap he went.
I love these moments as a parent. So much of your time is spent doing everything you can to make sure the most important thing in your orbit doesn’t get hurt. When an opportunity presents itself for safe failure — spilling a glass of water, tumbling from a narrow ledge over grass — you can sit back and watch an early lesson learned without intervention. Nobody gets harmed. Knowledge is gained.
Thinking on these moments the other day I realized how applicable it is to startups on a couple of levels:
Macro - You’ve found traction and need to continue to learn without disrupting momentum.
Micro - You need to let go of things you used to do, and let your team learn how to do them.
So today we’re going to talk about these moments, how we find the opportunities for safe failure, and how you can navigate them within your organization.
-
TL;DR:
Be observant in your day-to-day, and you’ll find many opportunities for you and your team to take risks and learn new things that will make you stronger going forward.
The details:
When was the last time you truly built the bare minimum to learn something? Spoke to your customers about something you've been thinking about? Let someone else run the meeting? Why not?
More often than not the risk profile of the above is low and the value to your business exponential — even in the worst case scenario of a flop.
Here are ways to foster these types of risks within your organization:
Try it.
To continue to evolve as a startup, regularly be launching tests that give you answers on where to go next.
Look at your roadmap and identify opportunities you think the organization should pursue, but aren’t 100% sold on yet. For example:
Should we build this new feature?
Is this audience segment worth expanding into?
How would our users react to this different pricing strategy?
Identify how you can run an experiment that gauges your audience’s interest in any one of these opportunities. Some of these tests might involve building an MVP – here’s a blueprint for that – but others can be much simpler, like sending an email.
Put it in front of your audience and ask them to take one specific action. Three easy ways to do this include:
Launch a straightforward landing page and drive your audience towards it with an ad.
A/B test email headlines or copy to a segment of your audience.
Post on a social media platform and get your community involved.
See what happens. Set clear KPIs ahead of time to measure against and inform what success looks like.
Note: Not all of these experiments should succeed. If they do, you have an opportunity to be bolder.
Give your team opportunities to grow.
Developing junior staff is always integral, but especially so at startups where every hand on deck matters. Find some safe opportunities for them to learn.
Provide external speaking opportunities. When the client or partner relationship is more established and the stakes are lower, allow team members to present in meetings. Give your teammate a heads up that they’ll be asked to speak and offer to help them prepare talking points so they feel equipped to take on the opportunity. After the meeting, regroup one-on-one with them to discuss what went well and where they can improve.
Present work internally. During an all-hands meeting, give one person the opportunity to present a project they recently worked on and how it came to life. Offer to help them prepare and meet with them afterwards, similar to what we outlined above.
Allow them to take the first pass. Instead of providing an outline or clear direction, allow a junior team member to pinpoint what they believe the next steps are. Have them run those by you for feedback and then let them run with it. Not only will this allow them to take more of an ownership role, but it also will help prepare them for the next step in their career.
If parts of your business or team aren't occasionally hitting bumps in the road…then are you taking enough risk? Find opportunities to do so and make your business stronger.
-
🤝Let’s work together. If you would like to learn more about Robin, or want to talk about your brand’s marketing, communications, and product development initiatives, contact us at hello@androbin.co.
P.S. If you were forwarded this email and found it useful, subscribe here to receive future updates.
