Making wrong decisions or taking wrong steps late in a project or a business matter cost companies huge sums these days. The reason for such huge cost is that we put many hours of efforts and endless development time before we really try out the idea we have. In a way, we do not see and recognize our mistakes made early in the process before it is too late.
Fortunately, methodologies within business development and not at least software development called LEAN and Agile are trying to reduce this waste by asking us to “Fail fast”.
You wonder how can this help? The easy answer is to compare this with how babies learn to walk. Babies try to stand on their feet and walk. They fall down many times. They retry and learn from the earlier steps until they manage to take few steps. Sometimes they even use different kinds of support. Then they tune the knowledge they have gained so they can make the walking more elegant.
In the same way, you should seek to find weaknesses in your work very early in the process. Make the mistake and get the knowledge associated with it, adjust your course and move on. With other words, by failing fast you succeed faster.
The reason of failure is usually associated with people doing a job without knowing what the customer on the other end really wants or by making a guess that the customer or the market need my services. An easy, yet very little used way of getting rid of this issue is to use the law of GOYA, Get Off Your Ass. Get out and socialize with your target group. They will tell you what they need.
Of course, there are sometimes a need to guess what the market needs. In such cases, you should run a validation test as early as possible to validate your thoughts, get feedback so you can convert your ideas into profit.
In summary, to succeed you should try to iterate on your plan:
- Divide your large plan in smaller plans
- For each small plan
- Build
- Test what you have built
- Adjust
- Repeat steps
- Move to next
If you need assistance to succeed faster, please let me know and I will be grateful to see you succeed!