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. October's agile tips are centered around tactics you can employ to transform your organization into an agile one, and are provided by Digsite CEO and Co-Founder Monika Wingate.
Tip 1: Form Your Team Early
The last thing you want is to conduct research, share the results with your team and then have them disregard the results because they weren’t a part of the process. To avoid this outcome, get the people who will use the research results involved in the process early on.
Start by picking a few people who will be part of the design, development and decision-making process (e.g., a product manager, a researcher and a designer). While you definitely want to build a cross-functional team, but be careful to avoid putting too many people on it. Aim to create a small group of between four and eight people.
Tip 2: Prioritize Your Focus
The minute you mention you’re going to conduct research, your team might flood you with research questions they wish they had answers to. Your job during this step is to vet the questions and determine which will result in actionable decisions versus which would simply be nice to have or would be better answered later.
Tip 3. Get Target Customers Involved
Figure out what your learning objectives are. Typically, you’ll want to capture context and feedback. Then you’ll need to identify who you want to talk to—the exact people who have the needs you’re trying to meet. Create stimuli that help them test what you’re thinking of building or what you’ve built already. This could be a 2D sketch, a 3D virtual model or a physical prototype.
Tip 4. Chart Interim Results
To learn more about how your organization can make the move to agile research, here are some resources to check out:
- How Innovation Teams Use Agile Research to Build Better Products
- Agile Research Guide: How Teams Can Innovate Faster
- How to Build an Effective Agile Research Team
