Levels of Learning through Learning Launch

Challenge

I was working for a software company in their transformation and strategic initiatives team.  Our  objective was to launch a new commercial model that would provide customers with more flexibility in  how they consumed our software, with the added benefit of creating more recurring and predictable  revenue for the company.  We faced two challenges: i) we had to launch this new model in a very short  amount of time.  We had five months to design, implement, and launch in order to beat competitors  that had been working on their respective versions of the new commercial model for years; ii) we had  very few dedicated team members to help with this strategic initiative.  Other than two members of the  transformation team, every other member of the organization – from Product to Operations to Sales  and Marketing to Legal – had a day-job that they still needed to deliver while supporting this project.

Selection

The tool that we selected is learning launch, which is a small experiment to test an idea in the real  world.  We called them pilots at the time, but as Ashour highlighted in her video, our goal was  not to come to a go/no go conclusion (we knew we had to go!), but to check our assumptions, obtain  ideas on what we needed to be aware of, and modify our commercial model before we launched at full  scale to the entire Sales organization.

Application

We kicked off our learning launch early in the program in order to test different elements of the  commercial model quickly.  At first, our objective was to test whether the flexibility benefits of the new  model resonated with our customers.  As time went by, we started testing whether the economic and  financial benefits of the new model were compelling for our customers.  Finally, we turned our attention  to our internal customers – the Sales organization – to see whether they felt sufficiently equipped to  present the new commercial model to our external customers.

We conducted the learning launch by dividing ourselves into small core teams to work with individual  customers, conducting frequent calls with the customers to present our ideas, walk through our logic,  and ask for their feedback.  In addition, we came together as a cross-functional team on a weekly basis  to share insights from our learning launch: what had the Product and Pricing teams learned based on  what customers were saying?  How would this insight then fold into what our Operations teams needed  to build, and how our Legal team needed to draft our contracts?  What insights could we take from the  learning launch that would feed into our own business case to replace some of our assumptions with  tested figures?

We took a highly iterative approach but did find ourselves sometimes struggling with our “n” sample  size.  We regularly questioned ourselves on whether we were working with enough customers to gain  enough insight from the learning launch, or whether we were working with too many customers which  was creating a challenge of scalability.  Had our learning launch unintentionally gone from small to big,  demanding more resources and capacity from an already stretched team?

Insight

While we gleaned a lot from the learning launch, I will highlight two main takeaways: i) we confirmed an  assumption that there were different customer personas, and so we needed more than a ‘one-size-fits- all’ commercial model in order to appeal to different buyers, and ii) we realized that how we articulated  the flexibility benefits to our customers needed to be tactical, with real world numbers and real world  examples, not abstract with hypothetical scenarios and dummy figures.  Besides providing us valuable  insight on the commercial model itself, the learning launch also helped us address our original challenge  of limited time and limited resources by focusing attention and capacity on the big needle movers for  success: compelling, tailored, and example-backed value propositions for customers, and easy-to- consume training and enablement material for our salespeople.

The use of the learning launch tool also created a foundation for how we as an organization approach  new offers and new models: we like to experiment.  Depending on the project or initiative, we use  different tools that I now understand to be a part of the design thinking toolkit, primarily rapid  prototyping (make a concept tangible for testing), customer co-creation (working with the customer to  create the solution), and learning launch.  As a next step, I would like for us to take this same  experimentative approach to changes that we need to make internally, where we treat internal  functions or departments as the customer, and prototype, co-create, and launch new ways of  simplifying our business.

Approach

Going back to our original commercial model, in hindsight, what we did not stop to consider during the  learning launch was the question that Professor Hess raised in his video on the learning launch tool:  under what circumstance would our commercial model not work?  We were so focused on identifying  the changes we needed to make to successfully launch the commercial model in the short timeframe  with the limited resources, that we did not consider the circumstances in which it would not be  successful.  This is only something we realized after we launched at scale, which dampened the  excitement and buzz, and if I am perfectly honest, probably lost us credibility with a few key Sales  leaders.  In future, when I use the learning launch tool again, what I will do differently is to bring a few  skeptics into the fold so that we avoid the trap of confirmation bias, and instead get a true picture of  what will and won’t work.

