PEXA-typing: embedding pretotyping company-wide (in under a year)
In early 2020, the innovation team at PEXA - one of Australia’s leading organisations in property technology - started integrating pretotyping into their innovation process. Just nine months since it began, they had already run 50 pretotypes, and pretotyping had become embedded across all areas of the organisation.
As a company centred around innovation, CEO Glenn King says that pretotyping is the answer to a crucial question: “How do you ensure that you keep that philosophy of innovation going… and do it in a way that is fast-paced, uses experimentation, celebrates learning, and doesn’t mean investing a lot of money?” Pretotyping is fast becoming central to PEXA’s innovation process, Glenn says, “I was keen to broaden it across the organisation to unleash the potential of our 300+ people...and have leaders be actively and visibly involved, so that we can really live our values of Innovate for Good and Better Together.”
Increasing idea quality and innovating for good.
“Innovate for Good” is one of PEXA’s core company values, and this notion of stretching boundaries and not accepting the status quo means that there are a lot of ideas within the company - far more ideas than could ever be processed and put into production,” says James Ruddock, PEXA’s Chief Product & Digital Officer. “What I love about pretotyping is the notion that you can very quickly test whether an idea has legs or not. Testing and validating ideas before they go into production means that if an idea can’t be validated with real data, it doesn’t get built: “by killing off [unvalidated] ideas, we have already saved millions and millions of dollars of wasted effort.”
But pretotyping isn’t just about stopping unvalidated ideas from being developed - it also aims to increase the quality of the ideas that go through the innovation process, and iterate the ideas themselves before going into production. “With the ideas that do get through the pretotyping process,” says James, “we have seen great refinement over what the potential solutions [to customer problems] could be…It helps to know where things should go, and make sure ideas are really stress-tested to make sure they are going in the right direction.”
“What’s great about [how we’ve embedded pretotyping across the company] is that we’re now using it outside of product development.” PEXA uses pretotyping to bring innovative solutions across the organisation, including new business venture ideas, operations, customer service, and HR.
By using pretotyping internally at PEXA, James says, they have helped managers work out which changes to make within their teams and processes: “Managers have embraced pretotyping because it allows them to process ideas and sort the wheat from the chaff… Pretotyping [provides] good guidance to the people on the ground about what is worth doing and changing, as opposed to having millions of ideas thrust onto people’s plates, where no-one has any idea what to do with them.”
So, how do you embed pretotyping company-wide within a year?
Embedding pretotyping into PEXA has fundamentally changed the way that the organisation approaches innovation, says Natasha Reidy, Head of Innovation and Labs. “Innovation in the market is thought of as, ‘We need to build the next big thing that’s going to change the game.’ It’s seen as needing to be big and disruptive, but now [with pretotyping] we are understanding the benefits of incremental innovation...”
The pretotyping process started with a one-day workshop with Exponentially’s CEO Leslie Barry, and the innovation team at PEXA - a small, cross-functional group that were able to run pretotypes and gather initial data. Following the workshop, the group worked with Exponentially to develop their pretotyping practice across a series of sprints. “At the start we just needed to get into the rhythm of it,” says James. “So we set certain targets for numbers of experiments, in order to build that pretotyping muscle... Then people start to learn what it is and how it works, and the process evolves over time.”
As the methodology proved to be a success, the team took their findings to the board, who decided - based on data, not opinion - to take pretotyping PEXA-wide. “We almost pretotyped pretotyping,” says James. “We started with a really small group and then we slowly built out a pool of people until we got critical mass… then people started talking the same language and using the same method, and it just grew from there.”
Reporting the results of experiments back to the organisation and executives was a key part of the successful company-wide uptake of pretotyping, says James. “We started answering questions like, ‘How many successful ideas have been implemented?’ ‘What has been the return on investment?’ ‘For those ideas that were killed, how much did we save?’”
Pretotyping soon became integrated into PEXA’s culture: the number of experiments run is now part of the company’s score-card; there are company-wide experiment check-ins every week, an ‘Experiments’ Slack channel, regular showcases where Natasha’s team talks through pretotypes and their results, quarterly in-person training sessions from Leslie, and ongoing online training through Exponentially’s Learn Pretotyping course.
CEO Glenn King says that ongoing training is particularly important to ensuring that pretotyping is part of the fabric of PEXA’s culture. “It ensures that people understand what pretotyping is, the value of it, [so that] it becomes a core process… but when people are skilled up [in pretotyping] we also want to make sure they see it as beneficial to their ongoing career.” Glenn joins training sessions to talk about why he’s passionate about pretotyping, and sends daily company-wide updates on Slack that always mention pretotyping. This visibility and positive promotion of pretotyping helps keep the methodology on everyone’s minds, becoming a core part of the company’s processes.
Got a great idea? Better take it to the Pretotyping corner.
C-level Champions
Central to PEXA’s pretotyping success is that there was executive buy-in right from the start. “Executives can be your biggest activists, or your biggest antagonists … [and] we have had incredible board and executive support from the start,” says Natasha, who provided a one-page explainer to the board when PEXA started to integrate pretotyping. Exponentially’s CEO also gave a one-hour briefing to executives, which helped onboard them to the process and ensure they could support it from the top-down. Now, pretotyping has a monthly place in the CEO’s board report, helping to meaningfully inform the direction of the company.
“This year we have included [pretotyping] in our company scorecard,” says Glenn. “We have said that we’ll do 100 experiments this year, measuring on the basis of ‘experiments run’ rather than how many are successful or go to market, because otherwise you lose the intent behind pretotyping, which is about learning. And given we are all measured on that scorecard… and everyone gets rewarded [if we succeed], there’s incentive… and it means that every month the board asks, ‘How are we going with this metric of the scorecard?’”
According to James, pretotyping is also a no-brainer for everyone at the C-Suite level: “For People Experience [HR], pretotyping helps improve engagement and deal with internal ideas from staff. It helps us work out how the business can collectively make people better... For the CFO, pretotyping saves a lot of money… And for the CEO, it’s about taking all those elements and seeing that pretotyping has a lot of benefits for the organisation as a whole… It’s about living the ‘Innovate for Good’ value, and showing that we are serious about testing ideas, and not being happy with ‘fine.’”
50 pretotypes in 9 months: what’s next for PEXA-typing?
After last year’s successful implementation and PEXA’s first 50 pretotypes, the company’s new goal is to run 100 more experiments this year. Through ongoing training and support from Exponentially, Natasha is preparing to have more Certified Pretotypers in PEXA’s ranks to increase the volume and quality of experiments. “We’ve got to keep going,” she says. “We can’t stop now!”
As pretotyping continues to scale at PEXA, Natasha is excited to improve the team’s skills in experiment design. “When you have better quality experiments, you can get better data, and you get better product decisions… It’s all about refining the process, getting more strategic alignment between the experiments we are running and the strategic goals of the company.”
James says that going through the training is key to ensuring people trust the process. “The quarterly training session [with Exponentially] is when a cross-functional cohort can go through their pretotyping training, and we use it as a way of pooling ideas and bringing people together so they can be really engaged, which has been really important for remote working.” Continuing to train people in pretotyping provides valuable upskilling for individuals, and will help ensure the process remains core to PEXA’s company culture. “The more people engaging and feeling empowered with their own ideas,” says Natasha, “the easier it’s going to be to keep the program alive.”
Glenn is excited about what pretotyping will continue to do for PEXA. “It’s about making sure that people embrace it, see the opportunity, and it becomes part of the fabric - rather than saying ‘okay let’s just jump to a solution and build something,’ we want to use pretotyping as a core part of the process and get it embedded in the culture; we have to continually be working on it, and that requires everyone in the organisation... If you want to be a fast-paced, customer-led organisation… you have to be thinking constantly about how you’re going to expand and grow across all dimensions, and you want to have experimentation and innovation as central… Pretotyping is an important element of that.”