“Remember: You’re not trying to build a successful product; you’re trying to figure out if there is a product to be built.” Chrissy Bagby

 

The American Association of Veterinary State Boards—the membership association for the regulatory boards that oversee veterinary medicine regulation in the U.S. and Canada—had a problem.

AAVSB has enjoyed a long track record of success in creating and running programs, products, and services for their members and the practitioners they license. However, AAVSB’s staff and volunteer leadership realized they wanted to expand their portfolio to serve new customers in the industry and to generate more sources of recurring revenue. To accomplish these goals, they realized they’d need to invest resources in taking a more systematic approach to innovation and develop a process that would facilitate shared understanding and support across departments.

The problem was that AAVSB had too many interesting ideas with no formal process for deciding what to build in what order, “stress-testing” their many good ideas before launching, identifying assumptions, choosing appropriate metrics, determining which hypotheses to test first and how to test them, staying focused and setting priorities, and identifying when it might be time to course-correct and how best to do that.

According to Chief Strategy Officer Chrissy Bagby, CAE, PMP, “We realized that if we wanted to ‘run our association like a business’ and be on the front end of innovation, we couldn’t just luck into success or hope it would happen organically. We had to be more intentional about instituting a new process for innovation.”

AAVSB staff was using many recognized good practices for product development, but much of that knowledge was tacit, scattered, and piecemeal. Their two-person innovation team, consisting of Bagby and Project Management Specialist KC McGuire, PMP, had instituted good project management practices, which helped them identify several potential gaps in AAVSB’s innovation processes, and they suspected there might be more.

The question became: How could AAVSB staff identify the skills they would need to innovate, acquire those skills, and institutionalize them across the organization?

They needed a repeatable process, so that it didn’t matter who came up with the new idea, investigated its feasibility, or piloted the development the new product, they would all have the tools and the knowledge they needed to create shared understanding of their goal and to communicate that goal to stakeholders, including the board of directors. This would give the organization the best chance of success and identify any problems with the idea early in the process before committing significant time, money, and other resources.

They decided they needed an experienced partner to help them identify a complete solution and implement it quickly.

AAVSB chose Spark Consulting to identify and evaluate options and assist in choosing and implementing an innovation methodology that the entire organization could use.

The result was the development of the AAVSB product development framework, based on lean startup methodology as originated by Eric Ries and described in his 2011 book, The Lean Startup. Ries developed this methodology out of his experiences using lean process improvement, which focuses on reducing waste and defects and working more efficiently and effectively.

Ries’ key insight? It doesn’t matter how quickly you’re moving if you’re headed in the wrong direction.

Lean startup methodology relies on a few key concepts designed to make sure you’re going the right way and going there quickly and efficiently:

• The lean canvas is a one-page business plan tool that allows you to focus the design of your new offering and begin articulating the assumptions that go into it, so you can start testing and validating (or disproving) them.
• The build-measure-learn cycle is the core of the methodology. It tasks adherents with building the minimum viable product—a prototype that is the minimum version of the product you can build with the smallest investment of resources and effort that is real enough to let you start testing your assumptions—and getting it into the hands of potential customers as quickly as possible so you can begin learning. Real people really using your MVP will help you discern whether you’ve correctly identified a real and significant problem and come up with a solution they’ll use and pay for. If you learn that you were wrong? You pivot.

(For a deeper dive on how associations can apply the methodology, download “Innovate the Lean Way: Applying Lean Startup Methodology in the Association Environment,” by Elizabeth Weaver Engel and Guillermo Ortiz de Zaraté.)

The AAVSB project team knew that lean startup wasn’t going to work perfectly “out of the box” and would have to be adapted to their culture and needs, so they ran an initial test on an already launched but underperforming product, which taught two key lessons. First, the team was able to figure out where the launched product had gone wrong, which led to a confident and evidence-based recommendation to terminate the program. Second, the pilot test allowed AAVSB to adapt and refine the lean startup framework to better suit their needs.

Next came the real test: Applying the product development framework to a new idea, a program designed for employers at the precise time their veterinary medicine licensees most need licensure assistance, which could potentially create a new product for a new customer (the employers) while better serving an existing customer group (the licensees).

Over about four months, the project team worked through an entire product development framework cycle, completing a lean canvas, designing an MVP, identifying metrics that matter, and outlining the first two iterations of testing through the build-measure-learn cycle.

Then it was time to test that first live prototype, which AAVSB is currently doing, with 12 employers included in the pilot.

“One of the biggest advantages of the whole process is that while it felt long and slow going through it, with lots of meetings bringing the staff up to speed, now that the prototype is running, everyone knows what the product is and what assumptions we are testing first,” said Bagby. “When we get information back from the pilot participants, whether it verifies or disproves one of our assumptions, we’re able to assimilate it better, respond faster, and remove barriers quicker for the team that is managing the prototype, so they can run their next cycle of tests.”

That shared understanding extends to AAVSB’s board of directors. “Our board is really pleased. The whole project is now transparent so everyone can see the plan and identify our initial investment and our progress toward our end goal. We have been able to provide regular updates against the parameters we’ve set and agreed upon. The board has tremendous trust in what we’re doing, which is invaluable,” said Bagby.

What has been the most challenging part of all of this?

“’Building the plane while flying it’ is imperfect, but it is also not feasible to build a fully completed methodology before testing it,” said Bagby. “That denies you the opportunity to learn which elements aren’t working the way you need them to along the way. It’s critical to pay attention to the personalities and dynamics of your team and help them learn the structure of the process and new ways of working while resisting the temptation to force them to a predetermined destination. The good news is our staff has embraced this approach.”

“Will every new product idea end up being the product we initially envisioned? Likely not,” said Bagby. “But the goal of this process isn’t to guarantee a successful product. It’s to determine if the market even sees the same value in an idea that we do. The product development framework has freed us to say: ‘Hey, we’ll try something. If that doesn’t work, we’ll try something else until we figure it out.’”