The concept of Learning Cycles is not just something for innovation. I think it is a mindset that is needed to replace the traditional marketing funnel. We should be building learning experiences with our customers. Tim Schipper and Mark Swets give a brief introduction to Learning Cycles below. An expanded version is available in a transcription and podcast: Lean Development and Learning Cycles
Joe: I like the way you broke that down, and you called it a “Learning Cycle.” Can you explain what a Learning Cycle is?
Mark: A learning cycle starts out with scoping or planning and in the scoping and planning section we are interested in understanding the problem or a subsystem that needs to be solved for. We’re taking a larger problem, whatever it is; maybe a large system design or system problem and we’re dividing it into a smaller subsystem which we place in the learning cycle. So, we list the questions to answer, and when we list the questions to answer, we are listing the things that we don’t know, the discoveries that we need to make about the problem. Those questions go into the learning cycle.
In each learning cycle, we really want to do the design so we can solve those questions. What do we design, whether it’s an experiment, whether it’s a test, whether it’s some part of the system we want to prototype, and we actually build that and do the test and then look at how it informs the questions that we asked at the beginning of the learning cycle.
Tim: In a learning cycle, the way we sum it up is it has these things. It has a plan, a design, the build phase, a test phase and then a review of the results.
Joe: How do you keep track of all that, of what stage you’re at and what you’re doing during a product development cycle? Are you mapping it somehow or how do you keep track of all this stuff?
Mark: The learning cycles do lend themselves to fit over our traditional product development, or IT development process. We put the learning cycles right on top of our existing process. They fit very well on top of it because as Tim talked about, the idea behind development is; its things we don’t know the answer to. It’s a fun part of the business, but it’s kind of a messy part of the business because we don’t know the answer. So, these are really fitting inside of our concept phase or inside of our development phase.
Tim: Our product development phases stay the same. What we’re doing here is trying to accelerate how we come up with the answers or how we come up with the solutions.
Tim Schipper and Mark Swets are the co-authors of Innovative Lean Development: How to Create, Implement and Maintain a Learning Culture Using Fast Learning Cycles. In this book, they share those examples while providing a road map that all companies can follow to reach a Lean development culture.
Lean Sales and Marketing: Learn about using CAP-Do
Special Marketing with Lean Book and Program offers on Facebook