Today’s leading organizations are increasingly employing agile approaches to developing new marketing programs, product or service innovations and customer experiences. By leveraging agile market research methods, your organization is able to simultaneously design, test and build new solutions before going to market. This approach speeds time to market, while still ensuring your go-to-market strategy fits with consumers’ changing lifestyles, situations and needs.
Our monthly blog post offers practical tips and advice on how to implement agile research. November's tips are all about helping consumer insights teams thrive in an agile environment, and are provided by Digsite CEO and Co-Founder Monika Wingate.
Tip 1: Be Flexible
The best agile researchers are highly flexible. They simply love doing research and they are comfortable not only with design, analysis and reporting – they are comfortable talking directly to consumers. Since agile teams are small, the best members have the flexibility to play whatever role is needed to keep the team moving.
Tip 2: Immerse Yourself in the Research Process
Effective contributors are ready to fully immerse themselves in the research process, internalize customer insights and discuss the implications of all of them with the rest of the team. Truth be told, they live and breathe research and are keen on drilling down as deeply as they can and collaborating with a team to address customer pain points to the best of their ability.
Tip 3. Think Outside the Box
Great agile teams are built on the backs of creative employees. These folks think outside of the box and understand that they need to balance between risk and rigor. Through repeated research and iteration, they also know that they can continuously learn and get closer to the truth. The right team members should be ready to brainstorm scrappy approaches to test ideas day in and day out.
Tip 4. Plan for Retrospectives
Plan for a retrospective review of your new agile research approaches. Go beyond whether the research got you what you wanted, when you wanted it. Take time to understand what went well and what didn’t with the research process itself so you can get better at being agile in the design and management of the research, and as an overall marketing or innovation team.
To learn more about how your organization can make the move to agile research, here are some resources to check out:
