Strive for progress, not perfection
If you ask me, the best part of working and living today is that we get do-overs. Nothing is written in stone and we’re living in a constant beta stage where anything can happen — at any time. To use some of our own terminology, we are living in a pop up world that forces (or should force) constant iteration.
At The Pop Up Agency we try to continuously innovate and propose new ways of working. Ways that are adapted to today’s fast pace of living. Even though we’re not always the target audience ourselves, we will learn and adapt. That’s the only way we can strive for continual innovation. We, as an agency, need to change at the same pace as the consumers. And that’s the real reason for us to test, succeed and fail hard too. And failing happens easily because with consumers moving faster than ever, you need to push your product faster than ever. That means launching products super early and accepting the fact that there’s no such thing as a ‘finished’ product. This approach is often the one behind the greatest failures but also the greatest successes.
Along the road of The Pop Up Agency we have launched several side projects, with various results. But weather or not they have succeeded or not, we’ve always gained insights from our experiences. The process of creating is teaching us invaluable lessons that we can take with us to our clients when we develop products for them or solve their problems. Because even though we are not getting any revenue out of it, we are getting the best value of them all; watching the users and learning what works and what doesn’t. When we know that, we can act on it. And thats when it all starts. No one is creating their own products anymore — no one should at least — the users are creating them for them. And the faster you can involve them in your product creation phase the better — don’t go too far down the wrong path before you iterate. Always strive for progress, not perfection.
Another example is Google (yea, I know but I had to). They were definitely not first to develop a search engine, but they were able to make progress in the market by working quickly, learning faster and taking their next steps based on data. And that was the beginning to a million products whereof some are definitely better than others. I don’t know if you guys remember but they had a product called Google Waves that was launched in May 19th 2010 and it suspended November 22nd same year and after a lot of back and forth it was finally shut down in 2012. Failure? No. Google probably got much more data and learning than we can even imagine from that — some of which they have used in more than one of their following products.
At The Pop Up agency, we have promised ourselves to (in best NIKE fashion) just do it. If the team thinks something is interesting and we see a potential market, we do it. One might argue that our focus should be on getting and working for clients but we believe that in order to deliver the best, most innovative and creative solutions to them, we need to be that ourselves.
Now, go out there and practise less creative thinking and more creative doing. I promise you that it will get you further.
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Until next time,
