“If you can dream it, you can do it.”
I never thought that I would be quoting Walt Disney two days in a row, but after reading a New York Times interview with Todd Park, President Obama’s chief technology officer, that’s where my mind went.
Asked about the culture of Washington, D.C., compared to Silicon Valley in terms of getting things done, Park replied, “I have actually found a lot more similarities than you might expect. Whenever the president gives us a mission to harness tech innovation and get something done for the American people, in terms of growing the economy and improving health care, we go find the folks across government who have been dreaming [my emphasis] about that for a really long time.” Park said that those “talented innovators” are then put on teams to create a virtual start-up, modeled on a philosophy called “lean start-up.” “You want to build small, interdisciplinary, agile teams that have strategy, policy, ops and tech all represented in one team, all working to solve one problem.” SIPA members can relate to that. New products require early buy-in from executive leadership, editorial, marketing, IT and operations at the very least.
“Secondly,” said Park, “there’s an emphasis on rapid prototype. You don’t think aircraft carrier, you think rowboat—the smallest possible thing I can deliver to my actual customer as early as possible, so they can actually start getting their engagement.” I like that phrase, getting their engagement; makes it sound kind of hip. (Park can turn a phrase.) There’s a reason that audience engagement was one of the tracks at the recent SIPA Conference in Washington.
How does this apply to SIPA members? The days of working quietly for a few months on a new product are over. If we are going to be successful at integrating our product into our customers’ workflow, they should probably have a say in it. Working on a new daily? Send out snippets and see if people will consume it. Try different times of day. Thinking of a new webinar series? Start with one or two and see the reaction. It’s okay—or even sometimes encouraged—to fail at something today. Darrell Gunter advised “fail fast and adapt.” Park agrees. “The third principle is rapid iteration—iterate [your new] product at high speeds with versions released every few days or every few weeks, instead of every few months or years, so you maximize the learning. So from the ground up, you eventually get to a real understanding of what the customer wanted and how to create something that delivers that. So that’s the model that we’ve been adopting.
“…The key is that we have an idea. We find the three or five people initially that had the idea a long time ago or had a similar idea across the government, put them together in this lean start-up team, liberate them to actually operate, give them the air coverage to do so, and they rock ’n’ roll from there.” Calling the department of mixed metaphors. Park gave credit for this idea to Eric Ries, a 30-something entrepreneur who coined “lean start-up” three years ago. Ries’ inspiration was the lean manufacturing process, fine-tuned in Japanese factories decades ago and focused on eliminating any work or investment that doesn’t produce value for customers.
“The agile practices have to be adapted,” Ries said at the time, “shifting the focus somewhat from generating stuff to learning about what customers will want. Most technology start-ups fail not because the technology doesn’t work, but because they are making something that there is not a real market for.” The part about finding out what the customers want hasn’t changed and probably won’t. The key development process now is getting user engagement early to refine products to fit what the market will pay for. In that case, dreaming may not always be enough.
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Ronn Levine began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering a variety of topics before joining SIPA in 2009 as managing editor. Follow Ronn on Twitter at @SIPAOnline