How business agility increases revenue

Today we're going to talk about increasing revenue. What's the potential impact we can have on the bottom line by focusing on revenue growth. One of the clearest ways in which business agility helps us there is by helping us get high-quality products into the market faster.

This week takeaways:

• Put high-quality products into market faster
• Create rapid feedback loops
• Capture the opportunity quickly 

 We love to hear feedback! If you have questions, would like to propose a topic, or even join us for a conversation, contact us here: feedback@definitelymaybeagile.com 

Transcript

Peter 0:04

Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Definitely Maybe Agile. Today we continue our series on how business agility impacts your bottom line. What's on the cards today, Dave?

Dave 0:22

We've talked about reducing operational expense. The other aspect, I mean, really, there's only three ways that you can meaningfully impact that bottom line. We can reduce expenses, we can increase revenue, or we can increase profitability, right? And so we're going to talk today about increasing revenue. How can we, uh an agile organization, not an agile delivery team, but an agile organization, what's the potential impact we can have on the bottom line by focusing on revenue growth?

Peter 0:50

Right. And one of the clearest uh ways in which business agility helps you there is by helping us get high quality product into market faster. Now, you often hear us talking about the fact that it's not just about speed, and that's the importance of the high quality. It's not just efficiency, we want effectiveness too. We need to ensure that we're building the right thing at the right time, and it's a high quality product that we're putting out into market.

Dave 1:14

Well, let me pick up on the high quality piece because I think uh it's perhaps not fully recognized all the time when we look at revenue growth. But one of the key things is you know, customers that love the product. And whenever, certainly when I have conversations with product owners or when I have a conversation with clients about the products they love, there is always an element or an expectation of exceptional quality. Now, exceptional quality obviously it varies in our that depends on the product that we're using, but basically we need a product that does what it says on the can, right? It does what it says on the tin. We know what's expected of it. It works in a way that is is not riddled with these little small micro experiences that really kind of needle us when we're clients or customers using those products.

Peter 2:00

Exactly. And it's important as well that um when we put these products out there and that we we can do this quickly because we want to be able to get that feedback, we want to be able to understand uh whether the opportunity is there, what is it that people like about the product? Is this doing what we expect it to? Where are those uh potentially defects? Where are those things that are wrong that are irritating the customers that uh we want to make sure that we can resolve those fast? Because these are things which will directly increase revenue. If we can make sure that we're putting out something that is of high quality and we're getting into market faster ahead of the competition, then that will improve uh the revenue, the amount of product that you can sell.

Dave 2:42

And I uh if I then move over to the second point that you made, and you just mentioned it again there, which is the speed with which we can get products out of the door. And again, that there's a lot of talk about this. There's if you remember many, many years ago, uh there was a kind of a well-known heuristic that for every whatever it was, 100 milliseconds that you were able to reduce page download time by, you could get a 1% lift in in um revenue generated by that page, assuming it's some sort of an e-commerce platform. Uh, I think that understanding of speed is shifting a lot much kind of more towards being able to get into the market with the right product swiftly and responding to, say, product launches or events that are happening that allow you to be recognized as being at the right place at the right time by your customers. So if I think of one of the most impactful transformations I've been involved in, where the benefits were measured and able to be measured in the tens of millions of dollars range, it was about one of the aspects there was being able to get merch uh merchandise into the marketplace and then into, therefore, the hands of the customers much, much more quickly than their competitors were able to do that. And that speed of being able to kind of move things through into the customers' hands has a significant impact on you know where people go to shop, basically.

Peter 4:06

There's also the other side of this, which we'll uh we'll be touching at in later episodes around it, also allows you to be able to say, okay, I tried this uh and I can see whether or not it succeeded, and I can and fail faster. I can say, okay, that I don't want to continue down that path. This isn't a product that's going to work for me. Or I can try many different things and I can try and I can assess which of these is going to work better and I can learn faster. And that rapid learning, too, is something that which enables us to uh uh work out which products we should leave in market, which products are going to uh have a greater impact on that revenue and invest more time and energy in those which will uh help uh grow our space and marketing.

Dave 4:46

Yeah, and simplicity comes in there, right? The art of things not done, or also the art of things turned off because the features just aren't doing it for the for our customers. Great. How would you summarize what we've just talked about? Increasing revenue. Obviously, a lot of organizations want to do that. How does business agility lead the way here?

Peter 5:04

So business agility, uh, and I think we we've talked about this uh in the terms of the high quality, allowing us to put high-quality products into market faster, allowing us to create rapid feedback loops for those products as we put them into market too, so that we can understand uh what's working and what isn't working, allowing us to focus our energy on the products that are actually generating the revenue. Uh, it that in turn allows us to capture the opportunity quickly. It means that we can be there with the right product at the right time to capture the opportunity, grow our revenue, and uh build our companies and our organizations faster. Would that sum it up? Is there anything you'd like to?

Dave 5:45

Yeah, I I think this is a really interesting one because unfortunately, in the few minutes that we have here, it feels like we're talking at an esoteric kind of high level. You know, some senior VP will dictate this as the mandate for 2022. And uh like where we see it, I'm speaking for myself, I'm sure for you as well, Peter, is where we see this is at the team level and the product owner level and the impact. It's it's something that you can really see on a sprint by sprint or release by release, the teams discussing it and seeing it and understanding it. And there's work to get there, but when you have those conversations, they start chipping that away. That the opportunities kind of come thick and fast if they're able to set the systems up and the mindset up in the right way.

Peter 6:30

And if you can get that alignment and that understanding between those two layers, between like the hey, the strategic, the high level, and what's occurring in terms of the the implementation, the execution, that helps guide those decisions. It helps allow that the flexibility. And that's where that those two pieces uh connect. So I think that's a very good point.

Dave 6:50

Yeah. I mean, there's would I I know we're funding. This is the bit that I'm speaking on. When you say that middle bit there, this is where when one of the things when you start seeing opportunities coming out for revenue growth is you need access to the funds to be able to unlock those, whether it's marketing spend, whether it's attention from a development team. So that's that middle layer there. Where's the flexibility there that allows an organization to be able to kind of um chase the real opportunities that start bubbling up once they're attuned to looking for them?

Peter 7:23

Exactly. Uh, with that, we're gonna sum it up for today, and you can send us your feedback at feedback at definitely maybeagile.com. And we'll look forward to seeing you next time. Thank you, Dave. Thanks again, Peter. You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock focus on the art and science of digital, agile, and DevOps at scale.