Andy Black
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Launch & Learn
Imagine building the two sides of a bridge towards each other, to find they don’t meet in the middle?
That’s going to be sooo expensive to fix.
Engineers know how to build bridges. It’s been done many times before, and there are steps that need to be taken in a particular order.
I imagine they would be something like:
When Software Engineering was born, the waterfall model was widely adopted.
Except there were a few key difference between what structural engineers were building, and what software engineers were building.
Structural engineering problems are often “known” problems. Engineers know how to build a bridge, know what problems they can encounter, and know how to get around them.
People also know how they will use a bridge before it has been built, so requirements rarely change.
Software engineers, however, often build things that have never been built before.
And users constantly change their mind over the features they want from software or websites that are being built. (It’s almost like they don’t know what they want until they see it!)
The waterfall model doesn’t help you build something you’ve never built before, for people who don’t know what they want until they see it.
So the smart software engineers came up with a different way of working… called “Agile Methodologies”.
Instead of spending 6 months gathering requirements, 6 months to design the solution, and 12 months to build the solution (the classic waterfall method), software engineers have short cycles where they get the most important requirements, design and build a prototype, get people to use the prototype, learn from feedback, and start a new cycle where they “iterate” the initial prototype.
Cycles can last a matter of weeks, and this agile method helps software engineers build what the users actually want, rather than what they thought the users wanted.
Sound familiar?
(drum roll)
Enter “Agile Marketing”.
This is where you build something quickly to get feedback from your market, so that you can iterate your offering and get into a continuous cycle of improvement.
So that when you eventually “ship”, you have no surprises, and already know the market wants what you’re selling.
Or if it’s a dud, you’ve already taken the product round the back and given it a swift bullet… before you invested too much time and money into developing it.
“Fail fast” as they say.
I do like the phrase “agile marketing”, but I’m not a big fan of buzz words that mystify rather than demystify.
One of my favourite phrases is one I read in Seth Godins awesome little book “Meatball Sundae”.
In it he summed up all this agile methodologies and agile marketing in 3 small words:
It’s become my mantra.
I’ve said before that the biggest benefit of AdWords is not that you buy traffic, but that you get to find out what your market actually wants, so that you can build it and sell it to them.
----------
Want to learn what the biggest benefit of AdWords is?
Read this post.
Imagine building the two sides of a bridge towards each other, to find they don’t meet in the middle?
That’s going to be sooo expensive to fix.
Engineers know how to build bridges. It’s been done many times before, and there are steps that need to be taken in a particular order.
I imagine they would be something like:
- Gather all requirements
- Come up with a design
- Build the foundations
- Build the next bit
- etc…
When Software Engineering was born, the waterfall model was widely adopted.
Except there were a few key difference between what structural engineers were building, and what software engineers were building.
Structural engineering problems are often “known” problems. Engineers know how to build a bridge, know what problems they can encounter, and know how to get around them.
People also know how they will use a bridge before it has been built, so requirements rarely change.
Software engineers, however, often build things that have never been built before.
And users constantly change their mind over the features they want from software or websites that are being built. (It’s almost like they don’t know what they want until they see it!)
The waterfall model doesn’t help you build something you’ve never built before, for people who don’t know what they want until they see it.
So the smart software engineers came up with a different way of working… called “Agile Methodologies”.
Instead of spending 6 months gathering requirements, 6 months to design the solution, and 12 months to build the solution (the classic waterfall method), software engineers have short cycles where they get the most important requirements, design and build a prototype, get people to use the prototype, learn from feedback, and start a new cycle where they “iterate” the initial prototype.
Cycles can last a matter of weeks, and this agile method helps software engineers build what the users actually want, rather than what they thought the users wanted.
Sound familiar?
(drum roll)
Enter “Agile Marketing”.
This is where you build something quickly to get feedback from your market, so that you can iterate your offering and get into a continuous cycle of improvement.
So that when you eventually “ship”, you have no surprises, and already know the market wants what you’re selling.
Or if it’s a dud, you’ve already taken the product round the back and given it a swift bullet… before you invested too much time and money into developing it.
“Fail fast” as they say.
I do like the phrase “agile marketing”, but I’m not a big fan of buzz words that mystify rather than demystify.
One of my favourite phrases is one I read in Seth Godins awesome little book “Meatball Sundae”.
In it he summed up all this agile methodologies and agile marketing in 3 small words:
LAUNCH AND LEARN
It’s become my mantra.
I’ve said before that the biggest benefit of AdWords is not that you buy traffic, but that you get to find out what your market actually wants, so that you can build it and sell it to them.
----------
Want to learn what the biggest benefit of AdWords is?
Read this post.
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