Digital’s F-word: Why failure is your friend, not your foe

UNRVLD is a Business Reporter client

“Learning from failure has the status of a cliché. But it turns out that a failure to learn from mistakes has been one of the single greatest obstacles to human progress.” Matthew Syed, Black Box Thinking

For organisations whose digital estate is business critical, standing still is moving backwards.

And you stand still by trying to play it safe and avoid failures. This might be under the guise of common boardroom speak like, “benchmarking competitor strategies”, or being “risk averse”.

But being risk averse is the riskiest strategy you can take when it comes to digital progress. You’ll only progress by taking risks. Some risks will pay off, others won’t, but learning from the failures is what propels you to win better in the future. Therefore, as a leader, you have a responsibility to your teams to create a culture with a progressive attitude to failure and an environment where educated risk-taking is encouraged. Failing shines a light on what doesn’t work, and allows you to create – and have confidence in – winning ideas.

User behaviours, technologies, and market trends are not constantly evolving (see: every LinkedIn post ever), because the word “evolving” implies random changes. Or “mutations”, which I prefer as a more accurate description - of both the evolution analogy, and what we actually see in web development that doesn’t have a proper strategy.

The most successful Digital Experience and Technology Strategies are instead in a state of Continuous Improvement. There’s a very intentional iterative improvement and tweaking of the dials that are happening behind the scenes to increase their value. We don’t want random mutations made to our digital strategy, thanks, we want intentional improvements.

But how can you have confidence that the intentional changes you’re making are creating a positive impact? The only way to build that confidence is to test and learn with lots of ideas; putting them in the hands of your customers so that they can prove what works. At the heart of test and learn is experimentation – a specific term used in digital optimisation programmes. And we call it experimentation because it’s about moving quickly and being scientific about the results. Enterprise web development is an expensive business, so the quicker you can test an idea and show that it will drive value, the more confident you will be to invest further in it. Experimentation therefore empowers you to make informed choices, backed by real user data, rather than relying on gut feelings or outdated best practices.

As developments are tested early at minimum expense, only those proven to have a positive impact on your business goals get investment approval for the full implementation. This means you’re going to get lots of failures. Which is good. Each failure teaches you something.

“Losing” tests can go back into the research backlog while winners go to market. The world’s biggest brands have been working this way for 20 years, and some even have experiment failure quotas that their teams must fill. Because if there aren’t enough failed experiments, those high street brands can’t build enough confidence in the positive results – and often feel their teams aren’t being brave or bold enough. As you can tell from the likes of Amazon, this leads to significant, exponential growth in your return on investment (ROI), as iterative improvements compound and create highly tuned business operations. Budgets are deployed more effectively and time to value is accelerated.

This flywheel effect means our teams at UNRVLD move faster, with more confidence, towards your defined business objectives.

As a digital agency that uses experimentation to optimize digital products to drive revenue, increase conversions, and increase engagement, we’ve witnessed firsthand the transformative power of this data-driven decision-making. We’ve seen businesses across all sectors, not just in ecommerce or highly tuned mobile apps, but on all sorts of digital platforms - such as those for home builders, finance and insurance, professional services and more. Companies like Barratt Homes, Marsh Commercial, and Taylor Wessing have invested in experimentation programmes to break free from the shackles of playing it safe, guesswork and intuition, and replace them with evidence and measurable results.

When this mindset takes hold and drives your digital strategy, it can transform the performance of your digital platform. Increasing the velocity at which you move towards clearly defined business outcomes is the real digital transformation. You’ll only get that flywheel spinning in your business by setting up your teams, processes and systems around continuous improvement through experimentation.

How often have you implemented a website change based on the hunch of the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion? How many ideas do you have, or do you know your team has? Experimentation removes all guesswork, nullifies the loudest voice in the room and democratises your ideas. Through testing, you can pit different versions of your website against one another, learn from the failed versions and double down on the winning ones. You eliminate the risk of costly missteps and ensure every change you make is backed by solid evidence.

When you get used to this and have embedded a culture of experimentation, you can expand its remit beyond web development. Why not test new service lines, channels, markets, or go to market motions (such as new subscription services)? Once the culture, processes and tools are established, you can scale your teams and scale the areas of focus.

It’s hyper competitive out there. Businesses that don’t embrace experimentation and make random mutations to their site in the hope it will evolve for the better, are falling behind – we see this every day. By helping to create in your organisation an experimentation culture that empowers your digital team to take educated risks, you’ll start to see failure as the best learning opportunity you have to intentionally, continually improve – and, most importantly, beat the competition.

Experiment with UNRVLD here.