BUILD MEASURE LEARN, A NEW ROCKET MODEL PROCESS?

Team Academy is about learning. We use a definition for learning: [Action x Reflection]^{Team members}. It is the basic of our learning. We use great learning tools: Motorola’s, the learning contract, customer visits. Still it seems a clear process to connect these is missing, a thread in the learning process to follow. It may be implicitly there, but not explicitly.  That could be on purposes, however let’s take a moment to consider how it would be to add a process to connect these tools in another way. That is what Eric Ries could be adding to the rocket model: a process. In this essay I propose to delete ‘Customers and marketing’ in the rocket model and replace it with ‘Build Measure Learn’ instead:

Build Measure Learn cycle

Students should learn achieving big hairy goals in small steps or learning cycles. They should learn to think in minimum viable products; define learning goals in a Motorola, build the MVP, measure its success and learn. Than repeat the cycle as many times until you reach the goal or need to pivot and establish new goals.

This way of working has several advantages, it is faster (Lean Start Up: working a batch of 1), it is cheaper as less investment is required and results are better.

The Build Measure Learn cycle is all about customers. Therefor it fits very well between the circles ‘Prospective customers’ and ‘Deep customer relationships’. Marketing fits here too of course, but I regard –at Team Academy- marketing more as a support process than a main process. For one thing, most of the projects do not have a marketing budget, but more importantly most actions are directly with customers and are one to few activities.

Pre-motorola questions could be modified

The premotorola questions are great. Still I like to add or amend some questions, in order to link it better to the BML process. These questions I like to add:

–        what hypothesis am I going to test

–        how am I going to measure the result

–        what skills do we need to achieve this

Each Pre-Motorola should start with the following:

–        Project

–        Project phase

–        Value Hypothesis

–        Growth hypothesis

The Motorola could also contain the following questions the 4 key questions when launching a product:

1. Do customers recognize that they are having the problem you are trying to solve,
2. If there was a solution, would they buy it?
3. Would they buy it from us?
4. Can we build a solution for that problem?

Post motorola’s are focussed on learning in a qualitative way. It is interesting to add more quantitative measure, such as:

–        What were the measured results

–        Were the results refute or confirm the hypothesis?

The question ‘what did we learn in this project could be changed to:

–        What did we learn in this iteration?

In this way the Motorola’s will support the process of the ‘Build Measure Learn’ cycle.

Also the Motorola’s will become more project focused.

Metrics

I aspect which is under valued at the moment at Team Academy is measurement, not only finance but of all results. A consequence of this change is that students would be invited to learn how to measure results in a more consistent way.

Discussion

This essay is meant to open a discussion on the subject of integrating the lean startup model into the Team Academy tools .

Looking forward for your input!