Fail Fast Fail Often - Jonathon Hensley - Episode #40

Jonathon Hensley is the CEO of EMERGE, a digital product agency, where he works with clients to develop valuable products and services based on business strategies, user needs, and new technologies. EMERGE has committed to a simple philosophy under Jonathon's leadership: the relationship between EMERGE and its clients should exist to create real and lasting value and to motivate people to take action. Inspire and motivate a team to focus on what is important.

Discussion Points:

• What myth or bogus strategy do you want to bust? 2:45
• How did you get to the point where you are now? Share some of your secret sauce with us. 5:53
• Do you have any stories to tell about a project that didn't go as planned? And how you used it to learn from it and move forward. 9:20
• How did you come up with a definition for failure? 14:55
• How do you define the strategy? 18:20
• How did you get started in business, how have you grown, and how have these strategic ideas aided your growth? 24:00
• Have you always worked in the area of product development? What drew you to product development in the first place? 27:05
• What did you release that was a game-changer for your company? Or What is the biggest mistake you made? 29:55
• How do you keep your team motivated, and what keeps your staff from leaving you? 39:16
• What initially drew you to product development? 43:15 
• What does the future look like for you and your agency? 46:05

 

Takeaways 

• I think it's really important that we understand the intentions of this idea of fail fast fail often and what it really means in an organization so it can be used effectively.
• Failure is not the objective of any organization, but to learn is critical to every organization. And so we have to get failed fast and fail often as a mechanism for learning and not a methodology that use it in the wrong way, can erode that accountability.
• Agile is meant to be about a continuous improvement and learning approach to more effective collaboration and delivery. And so this essence gets missed all the time.
• Through the additive, experimentation, testing, and validation, we were able to verify what we knew from the client. 
• Once you have a learning culture in place, and you can start to really think about how you implement it, you know the insights that come from each experimentation or each failure. You need to also have a clearer way of how that knowledge is then distributed across the company to collect it, help everyone level up. 
• When we look at micro experiments, we're looking at how we can collect that information to that insight much faster and in smaller increments.
• What does a great strategy need to encompass at its core, and these things are not very well articulated or defined for most organizations.
• Strategy is not that one-time thing, but it's episodic it has to happen is a continuing practice inside the business ongoing, and depending on how fast you're trying to grow, or evolve in the market, will determine how often you have to be working through those steps of strategy.
• The essence of what we do hasn't changed, but how we do it.
• The passion and the core of the company was still in the roots of where we started, which was in product.
• Time being spent on on staying true to our core and staying hyper focused with our core customer, and working in those being in that community, is would have been really powerful for us

Links 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathonhensley/
• Twitter:https://twitter.com/jonathonhensley
• Company website: https://www.emergeinteractive.com/
• Company linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/emerge-interactive/

Busted Myths: Fail fast and fail often.