In my last post about business and technology, I described the current state of low-cost, low-risk innovations that permits our company to have a “bias to test”. We have low hurdles to try new ideas, can test them on a portion of our audience, can explicitly measure the results of the test and deploy what works. I answered a bit about “what works” in a prior post about metric myopia. In this world, with low capex risk, low consumer perception risk, low client perception risk, the game becomes that of metabolism. How quickly we can evolve our products becomes our competitive advantage.
Our push right now is to keep our innovation cycle (hypothesize, test, measure, tinker, deploy or kill) as short as possible so that we can try as many things as possible. It is a bit Darwinian, but think of each of these tests as a mutation – it either helps, hurts or is neutral. So long as we can quickly identify and eliminate the “bad” mutations, we will be getting forever more effective.
Some tests are simple, like “does an orange call-to-action button test better than a blue one?” Other tests are a bit more complex; “what grade reading level for our content posts drives the most engagement?” The key here is frequency. It is working for us remarkably well.
It is also working for Apple.
There have only been 3 releases of the iPhone so far (and one strategically dropped prototype). But the metabolism rate of the iPhone is incredibly rapid. The basic functions don’t change (make a call, take a picture, locate yourself, get info from the web, post info to the web…) but the apps do.
For a consumer, investing in almost all apps (with the exception maybe of TomTom), is an almost no risk proposition. You are paying a buck or two in order to find out if your iPhone can become of greater utility than it was two minutes ago. I have not yet seen a report of iPhone virus apps. If the app sucks, delete it and maybe read a couple of more reviews next time. If the app is great, it is as if you just got a slightly better version of the phone beamed to your hand. The product is constantly evolving, being driven forward by a volunteer work force (in Apple’s perspective), constantly innovating to make a better mousetrap.
So, what are the hallmarks of a good, fast metabolism?
- low consumer cost for each incremental change
- an environment that can immediately assess good vs. bad changes
- low business risk for each change introduced (you should be more thoughtful when “betting the business”)
- have a going in hypothesis to test (otherwise, how can you tell if it worked)
- develop a bias for facts as opposed to opinions
- be happy with failed tests – if every idea is better than what you already have, what you already have can’t be very good
The iPad corollary – just because you have a product with a fast metabolism (the iPhone), does not mean you can’t benefit from quantum changes (Apple seems to be selling a bunch of iPads). Just remember, the risk-reward profile is vastly different and requires a different kind of innovation approach.
