Loop It!

Change is risky. All of us have tried something new with high expectations of how it would improve our lives only to be proven completely wrong. This isn’t big deal if you were just trying the new special at your favourite restaurant, but this can have massive consequences when making decisions for a business. When you are investing the time of employees, overhead and your reputation, there are only so many times you can survive being wrong.

At Numu, we are perpetually trying new ideas as part of our development. In order to manage these risks we have had to adopt a process called the Feedback Loop.

If you are an entrepreneur, we highly recommend reading The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. This introduced us to the simple development cycle of the feedback loop. It consists of 3 cycles: build, measure and learn.

Build It

If you want to be agile and evolve quickly, things need to get done. The key to the first step is to achieve the most basic solution to the problem (also known in development as the minimum viable product). The goal is to spend the least amount of time and resources to reach the point that you can begin testing your solution.

Measure It

Once you have a something that can be tested, it is crucial that you measure if the solution meeting your objectives. Set metrics of what you expect to be able to achieve and the value you expect to extract from what has been build in the first step. Whether you are collecting feedback from clients, peers or even just running tests, measuring if what is being build is successful is a critical step that needs to be cycled every time something is built.

Learn from It

Now that you have measured the success of what has been build, assess what can be concluded from these results. Are you achieving the value you expected from the solution? Has the solution addressed a different need that was unexpected? This is your opportunity to adjust the direction of your project in order to maximize the outcome. Another important conclusion that can be drawn from this step is if you should stop the project.

Fail Fast

In a culture of agility and freedom to try new ideas, we have embraced the value of failing fast. By developing new ideas and solutions using the feedback loop, our objective is to find out as quickly as possible if an idea is worth pursuing. This mitigates the risk of an idea being a complete failure but also provides tremendous value in directing successful projects towards focusing on where they truly add value.