Download - Production as strategy
www.zeusjones.com
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Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Production as strategy.And other contradictions of making modern brands.
May 20, 2011
Modern brands are defined by what they do.
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Classic model of a brand.Built for a mass-media
world.
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Modern brand model.Built for a world driven by
experiences and
interactions.
COREBELIEF
Established 2007 to build modern brands.We combine strategy, design and digital expertise. Many of us came from the digital side.
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
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A tale of two cities.Charles Dickens writing about London and Paris in 1775.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
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Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
A good description of Zeus Jones in 2009.
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Closing a hole in the sales cycle.Sales often delayed or lost
in the dressing room due to
need for approval.
Go to BP
Peruse the department
Choose items to try on
Try on clothes
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Closing a hole in the sales cycle.Sales often delayed or lost
in the dressing room due to
need for approval.
Do more research
Share photos
Look at photos and consider outfits
Go to BP
Peruse the department
Choose items to try on
Try on clothes
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Adjust outfits
Take PB Photos
Purchaseclothes
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
It was our best project of 2009.
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
It was our best project of 2009.It was our worst project of 2009.
What consumed most of our attention.And what ultimately limited our success.
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Surface background alternativesWe spent 3 weeks arguing against yellow, and then we lost.
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What we should have focused onUsing the content, learning about our customers, learning about our clothes.
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
We invested all our effort in the least valuable part of the experience and none in the most valuable.
Things we focused on Things we forgot about
Making it cool
Making it pretty
Stability
Perfecting an object
The customer
The experience
Building it
Making it cheaply
Making it fast
Flexibility
Perfecting a process
The data
The output
Building upon it
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Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Strategy is the process of making assumptions.As the world becomes more complex your chances of being wrong increases.
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Products and experiences reveal new opportunities for usage after they're built.That’s just one of the ways they differ from communications.
Image via RedDogFever Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
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The services we love the most are always in beta
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
We needed a modern approach to production that:Allows more consistent opportunities for feedback, new ideas, innovation, and iterative progress
Documents ideas, discussions and decisions and makes them available to everyone.
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Traditional Project ManagementBased on Fredrick Taylor's
"Scientific Management"
written in 1911
Used to scope out
systematic projects that
require up-front planning.
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Traditional project management framework.Predictability and systematic, linear development
Deterministic, reductionist approach that rely on task
breakdown
Stable requirements, analysis and stable design
Compliance as a means of project control
Individual resources as interchangeable cogs in the
machine.
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Problems with traditional project management methods.
• Creates a false sense of security that projects are being managed by exhaustive planning, measuring, and controlling.
• Adds unnecessary upfront cost and time for planning which in the end will be tested and changed throughout the project.
• Requires detailed, rigid proposals that are developed at the beginning of a project are written at a point in the project with the most uncertainty.
• Does not see participants as skilled and valuable stakeholders in the execution of the project.
• Change is seen as a result of poor planning which leads to the perception that the project is failing.
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Traditional project management creates inefficiencies.Fixed price bids/contracts are bad ideas for both
Design/Development companies and the client.
Clients think they are reducing their financial risk
with a fixed bid, but the reality is that it forces them
into a position where their money is almost always
wasted (see figure below). For developers, it almost
always motivates them to reduce the delivered quality
in order to make it within budget and/or time.
Always
Often
Sometimes
Rarely
Never 45
19
16
13
7
Source: Chaos Report v3. Standish Group. Copyright 2005-2006 Scott W. Ambler
Average percentage of developed functionality actually used when a traditional, linear approach to requirements definition is taken on a "launched" information technology project:
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
See, it was a production problem.
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Agile project management.Evolved from the agile
software development
manifesto in 2001 and the
fields of human interaction
management and business
process management.
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Agile project management frameworks.Flexibility and dynamic, cyclical development -
Launch with less, evaluate and revise
Focus on Guiding Vision
Change management and communication
Collaboration as a means of project improvement
Employees as skilled and valuable stakeholders
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Projects should and will change during execution.We manage the change to improve the project.
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
A fundamental change in how we organize and work.
• A view of organizations as fluid, adaptive systems composed of intelligent living beings
• A recognition of the limits of external control in establishing order, and of the role of intelligent control that employs self-organization as a means of establishing order
• An overall problem solving approach that is humanistic
• It regards employees as skilled and valuable stakeholders in the management of a team instead of cogs in a machine
• It relies on the collective ability of autonomous teams as the basic problem solving mechanism.
(2003-2008). Agile Project Management. Retrieved February 9, 2010 , from CC Pace Web site: http://www.ccpace.com/Resources/documents/AgileProjectManagement.pdf
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
It limits up-front planning to a minimum based on an assumption of unpredictability, and instead stresses adaptability to changing conditions.
Image via RedDogFeverZeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Turns out it was a strategy problem after all.
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
We needed a modern approach to strategy.One that limits the number of up-front assumptions made prior to developing a solution.
One that marries strategic development with product development.
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
One that reacts to new opportunities as they become available and uses them to solve business and marketing problems.
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Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Google even more.“Help us re-think how we
list our products.”
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
We started by asking ourselves what can be done? Rather than asking what could be done?
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Design as strategy: audit of product pages.Many product pages have an API that show what people are doing with the product.
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
The things people do with products are more interesting and more descriptive than the products themselves.Strategy emerged from design.
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2010.
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A cultural dashboardNew opportunities emerged from production.
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Production as strategy.We made it in 3 weeks, so we only built the things that were quick and easy to build.
Things we focused on Things we didn’t
Making it cheaply
Making it fast
Flexibility
The output
The data
Perfecting a process
Building upon it
Making it cool
Making it pretty
Stability
The experience
The customer
Perfecting an object
Building it
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Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Execution became a strategic conversation which made it less subjective and less arbitrary.
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Production as strategy frameworks.Turns client and agency into collaborators, outcomes
are purposefully unclear therefore no side can claim
to have the answer.
No separation between “thinking teams” and “making
teams,” thinking doesn’t end.
Projects improve as they progress.
Creates a situation where there are often too many
opportunities rather than too few.
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
A fundamental change in how strategists work.
• Need to get your hands dirty, can’t remove yourself from the actual making of things.
• Focus on behavioral pivot points rather than mental pivot points.
• Build strategy from the ground up rather than from the top down.
• Be more aware of what you don’t know that what you do know.
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
A fundamental change in how producers work.
• Think about change as an opportunity instead of something that derails the plan
• Create more opportunities for check-ins and collaboration
• Develop plans based on duration and resources vs. hours
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Develop strategic processes, not strategic plans, whose minimum outcomes will meet your objectives.But which also have the potential to deliver far more.
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Strategic starting points.
1. What’s the desired outcome in order to solve the problem?
2. What needs to happen first in order to achieve our outcome?
3. What can be built quickly to enable that?
4. How can building it deliver enough business value that the problem becomes easier to solve?
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
GMI ConnectHelp to create a culture of
cross-team and cross
division collaboration at
General Mills
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Collaboration worksheetCollaboration activities
Meeting spaces
Rich conversations
Collaborative workspaces
Q&A platform
Identifying people to collaborate with
Case study library
Virtual whiteboards
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Collaboration worksheetCollaboration activities
relative to development
difficulty.
Hard to Build Easy to Build
Hard to Accomplish IRL
Easy to Accomplish IRL
Meeting spaces
Rich conversations
Collaborative workspaces
Q&A platform
Identifying people to collaborate with
Case study library
Virtual whiteboards
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Collaboration worksheetCollaboration activities
relative to development
difficulty.
Hard to Build Easy to Build
Hard to Accomplish IRL
Easy to Accomplish IRL
Meeting spaces
Rich conversations
Collaborative workspaces
Q&A platform
Identifying people to collaborate with
Case study library
Virtual whiteboards
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General Mills ConnectCreating a culture of collaboration in the company.
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Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Connect strategy has been driven by user need and user observation.
Case Study: Senior Management Conference
• Used like twitter to post questions / feedback before & during conference
• Presented on displays around campus for “virtual attendance”
• 1000+ attendance
• Increased attendance, new interactions, new connections
• Allowed people to search for conversations after the event
Traditional strategy Modern strategy
Theoretical
Mental models
Prediction
Testing backwards
Monolithic
Results oriented
Reductionist
Practical
Tangible products
Observation
Testing forwards
Iterative
Guided by a vision
Expansionist
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Traditional strategy builds traditional brands.Strategy for a predictable,
focused outcome.
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Modern strategy builds modern brands.Strategy guided by a vision
and designed to create
complex and surprising
experiences.
COREBELIEF
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Modern brands connect in a more human way.Production as strategy is a more human way to build brands.
www.zeusjones.com
TF
+1+1
612612
279279
14001401
2640 Lyndale Avenue SouthMinneapolis Minnesota 55408
Zeus Jones Proprietary and Confidential. All rights reserved 2011.
Thank you!Questions and workshop.