The Lean Startup - Eric Ries [109]
After an entrepreneur has incubated a product in the innovation sandbox, it has to be reintegrated into the parent organization. A larger team eventually will be needed to grow it, commercialize it, and scale it. At first, this team will require the continued leadership of the innovators who worked in the sandbox. In fact, this is a positive part of the process in that it gives the innovators a chance to train new team members in the new style of working that they mastered in the original sandbox.
Ideally, the sandbox will grow over time; that is, rather than move the team out of the sandbox and into the company’s standard routines, there may be opportunities to enlarge the scope of the sandbox. For example, if only certain aspects of the product were subject to experimentation in the sandbox, new features can be added. In the online service described earlier, this could be accomplished by starting with a sandbox that encompassed the product pricing page. When those experiments succeeded, the company could add the website’s home page to the sandbox. It subsequently might add the search functionality or the overall web design. If only certain customers or certain numbers of customers were targeted initially, the product’s reach could be increased. When such changes are contemplated, it’s important that senior management consider whether the teams working in the sandbox can fend for themselves politically in the parent organization. The sandbox was designed to protect them and the parent organization, and any expansion needs to take this into account.
Working in the innovation sandbox is like developing startup muscles. At first, the team will be able to take on only modest experiments. The earliest experiments may fail to produce much learning and may not lead to scalable success. Over time, those teams are almost guaranteed to improve as long as they get the constant feedback of small-batch development and actionable metrics and are held accountable to learning milestones.
Of course, any innovation system eventually will become the victim of its own success. As the sandbox expands and the company’s revenue grows as a result of the sandbox’s innovations, the cycle will have to begin again. The former innovators will become guardians of the status quo. When the product makes up the whole sandbox, it inevitably will become encumbered with the additional rules and controls needed for mission-critical operation. New innovation teams will need a new sandbox within which to play.
Becoming the Status Quo
This last transition is especially hard for innovators to accept: their transformation from radical outsiders to the embodiment of the status quo. I have found it disturbing in my career. As you can guess from the techniques I advocate as part of the Lean Startup, I have always been a bit of a troublemaker at the companies at which I have worked, pushing for rapid iteration, data-driven decision making, and early customer involvement. When these ideas were not part of the dominant culture, it was simple (if frustrating) to be an advocate. All I had to do was push as hard as humanly possible for my ideas. Since the dominant culture found them heretical, they would compromise with me a “reasonable” amount. Thanks to the psychological phenomenon of anchoring, this led to a perverse incentive: the more radical my suggestion was, the more likely it was that the reasonable compromise would be closer to my true goal.
Fast-forward several years to when I was running product development. When we’d hire new people, they had to be indoctrinated into the Lean Startup culture. Split testing, continuous deployment, and customer testing were all standard practice. I needed to continue to be a strong advocate for my ideas, making sure