Speed is the name of the game. Ideas are cool and all but whoever executes it first is the winner. Making your idea, getting it out there, getting the correct feedback from the people who would need it and improving on it is important.

I want to start out by saying this is something that has been exciting me the most regarding branding work. It is something I have been spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to implement and get to work outright.

I am sure you may be familiar with the traditional sequential order of a strategy. The idea is that you go through a series of steps. Each step has to be done, locked and completed before the next is started. It is usually very long, inefficient, and you may make something that nobody cares about by the time it is done. We used to take this approach when working on a brand strategy too. All this work would get done before we really see if it is really even a worthwhile idea.

I started diving deeper into design sprints and we started running them this year. Our first one has been a massive success. Combining those with some agile principles has been a blast. The important part here is that we tested the idea before moving forward. Brand strategy has been a big part of this process. It actually led us in a whole new direction as we started to frame problems instead of solving them. It only took us 4 days to have a product and brand built to test and get feedback on. 4 days! Compare that to the 2-4 month process you may have had or been used to.

Instead of assuming, we tested with real people in the space we aimed for. This presented new insights we haven't considered, validated our idea, and even brought about new priorities that would get people excited about the brand and product.

How valuable would it be for you to find have a problem, frame a solution, build it, and test it within 4 or 5 days?

Agile principles have been around in the developing world for a while but bringing them into the strategy space opens up new doors we are excited to explore. Combining that with a Design Sprint (more on that later) is now allowing for structured speed.

We have been battling the issue with how do we speed up this process without compromising our outputs. We didn't want speed to get us sloppy. However, implementing these new techniques has allowed us to improve our services tremendously.

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