It was my co-founder Garry’s idea. He and I were discussing how we could get the whole company aligned on and involved in our growth mission for the remainder of the year, and beyond.
“Would Matt Lerner run a whole company workshop at May-HIP?”.
There are two things that possibly need explaining from that sentence. If you’re not familiar with Matt Lerner, he’s the startup growth guru behind the Growth Levers book and the SYSTM course. ‘May-HIP’ is Cronofy shorthand for the May instalment of our biannual whole company offsite.
Why it's the right time for experimentation
The foundational premise of the SYSTM experimentation method is that 90% of a startup’s growth comes from 10% of the things it does. To drive growth, you need to find the 10% and double down. This is why right now, Cronofy is honing in on experimentation to supercharge our growth, coupled with the £15 million investment from BGF to support our long-term embedded scheduling vision.
A lot of that has been situational and has been a personal focus of mine. I’ve been hiring and guiding objectives over the past year or so to get us ready to grow faster. Fast-forward to early May, and the whole company is sitting in a room, in the grounds of a chateau nestled in the sunny French countryside for Matt’s workshop.
The Cronofy team with Matt Lerner
The most impactful ideas aren't always self-explanatory
Ahead of the session, Matt had everyone complete a survey to help him, and us, understand the state of growth thinking in the org. As a team, we scored highly on Focus and Openness but definitely had work to do on Discovery and Insight. So that became the focus of the workshop. How can we improve our ability to run experiments, learn from them, and from customer insights?
We got our heads down to work in cross-functional groups and quickly learnt the value of different perspectives. Especially enlightening was watching our ambition expand as we explored experiment ideas that seemed good, ones that could 10x the business (without limits on budget or laws), and then those that just seemed bad. Whilst some of the bad ones were bonkers, many dialled back just 10% suddenly didn’t look so crazy.
The richest areas for experimentation lie between the 10x ideas and ones that seemed scary or bad on the surface. We designed Minimum Viable Tests to peel back the layers of complicated ideas, distilling them down to the core of what sparked our curiosity in the first place.
Inside the experimentation workshop
Ramping up to Cronofy's phase of growth
It was an intense day, but the energy of the team was palpable and invigorating. It really gave me the confidence that we had the minds in the room and thus people on the bus we needed to accelerate growth at Cronofy. The challenge for the leadership team is to capture and nurture that energy into our day to work.
We’ve already got a #customer-intel channel in Slack that is disseminating what we’re learning and enabling many more people to effect positive change for Cronofy and our customers. Much more to come as we fully embrace the method.
I’m excited as Cronofy is stepping into an era of higher experimentation velocity to enable us to test boldly, learn more from our customers, and to iterate without fear of failure holding us back from risky ideas. After all, that’s where true growth lives.
