What we learned - Get really clear on the goal
For the majority of the pilots in our sample, the focus was to get the resale program off the ground. The goal was “launch day”. The critical last step in the pilot best practices was missing – how to scale once off the ground.
Across all the pilots was a moment that followed celebrating all the hard work, from designing the pilot, creating the metrics, and evaluating its success, to then moment of looking at each other and saying NOW WHAT?
This seems crazy to most when we reflect on the investment made. Why would a company go to all the effort of designing and launching a pilot, but then not scale it. We identified two categories. One – there was never an intention to scale this, the pilot was the end goal, to appease certain stakeholders and leave it be. The other is that the pilot did its job and demonstrated that there was too much risk to scale.
For brands with pilots or about to launch one, our advice is focus on the scaling aspect of the pilot from the beginning, get clear on the goal. Innovation in other parts of your business happen when you set an ambitious goal to deliver something to market that you stand for, so plan your goal to go all the way to scaling the solution. Plan for scale, set your goal to scale as this will influence how you design your pilot as we will explore further.
