Strategies Mastering Problems & Challenges: From Vision to Change

Changes usually start with big visions. But how exactly does a vision become real? Change-Process? An example overview.

The challenge

In 2002 a clarinetist named James Freeman quit his job as a professional musician and started ... a mobile coffee shop. James was passionate about freshly roasted coffee. Back then, in the San Francisco catchment, it was virtually impossible to find coffee beans that were roasted on the packaging. So James decided to roast his coffee himself. He roasted the beans in a garden shed at home and then drove to a farmers market in Berkeley and Oakland, California, where he set up a mobile coffee shop. Every cup was freshly brewed. James was friendly and accommodating, and his coffee was excellent.

James and his coffee truck, called Blue Bottle Coffee, soon had a following. In 2005, he set up a brick and mortar Blue Bottle coffee shop in a friend's garage in San Francisco. Over the years that followed, his Shop and little by little he opened more cafes. In 2012, Blue Bottle cafes were in San Francisco, Oakland, Manhattan and Brooklyn. This was a deal that many would have called perfect. The coffee was considered one of the best in the country. The baristas were friendly and had extensive coffee knowledge. The interior decoration of the cafés was also perfect: wooden shelves, tasteful ceramic tiles and a restrained logo in perfect sky blue. However, James did not find his business perfect or complete by any means. He was still a passionate coffee specialist and restaurateur and wanted to bring the Blue Bottle experience to even more coffee lovers. That's why he wanted to open more cafes.

Besides, he wanted that People bring home freshly roasted coffee, even if they didn't live near a Blue Bottle coffee shop. Had his coffee truck been a Sputnik, the next phase would have been more like a rocket launch to the moon. In October 2012, Blue Bottle Coffee raised $20 million from a Silicon Valley investor group including GV. James had many plans for using the money, but the most obvious was to develop a better online shop selling fresh coffee beans. But Blue Bottle wasn't a tech company, and James wasn't an expert at it Online-Retail trade. How was he able to bring the magic of his cafes to smartphones and laptops?

The problem with good ideas

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Good ideas are rare. And no matter how good an idea is, that's no guarantee that it will turn out to be real Welt can also claim. This applies to everyone, whether they run a start-up, teach at school or in a large one Companys is working. The Implementation of ideas is sometimes a difficult thing. What is the most important point on which your entire Energy need to focus? And how do you go about it? What will your idea look like when it is actually implemented? Is it better to hire a particularly clever person to figure all this out, or should one Team-Perform brainstorming? And how do you know you're the right one Solution have found? How many Meetings and discussions are needed to become for sure to be? And once that's done, is anyone interested in your idea?

On a bright December afternoon, Braden Kowitz and John Zeratsky met James. They sat at a bar counter, sipped coffee and talked about the challenge. The online shop was important for the company. Getting it right took time and Money needed, and where and how to start? In other words, Blue Bottle Coffee sounded like the perfect candidate for ours Method. James agreed.

Convey a great experience

Braden, John, and James debated who should attend the meeting. A very clear one Candidate was the programmer who would be responsible for setting up the Blue Bottle online store. However, James also wanted to have the Chief Operating Officer, Chief Financial Officer and Communications Manager on board. He also invited the Head of Customer Service, who handles customer questions and complaints, and even Chairman Bryn Meehan - a retail expert who had started an organic food chain in England. And of course James himself would attend.

The online shop was essentially a software project, something our GV team was very familiar with. But this group didn't look like a traditional software team at all. The participants were busy managers who had to abandon their important work for a whole week. Would it be worth this time On Monday morning, the Blue Bottle team met in a conference room at GV's San Francisco office. We drew a diagram on a whiteboard to show how coffee consumers might move through the online store. The Blue Bottle team focused on a new customer who wanted to buy coffee beans. James wanted us to focus on that scenario because it was so difficult. If the company managed to gain credibility and deliver a great buying experience to a new customer who had never heard of Blue Bottle before, let alone visited its cafes and tasted their coffee, then any other situation would be a walk in comparison.

We were faced with a big question: How should we structure the coffee types? The potential buyer in this scenario would be able to choose between about a dozen coffee beans, each presented in nearly identical bags. But unlike the Blue Bottle Café, there was no barista to advise him. At first glance, the solution seemed to be the Hand to lie. From small, exclusive coffee roasters to mass-market corporations like Starbucks, retailers tend to classify coffee by region sortieren: Africa, Latin America, Pacific Region. Coffee from Honduras versus coffee from Ethiopia. It would only be logical if Blue Bottle structured its beans in the same way.

Brainstorm and find solutions

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"I have to admit something," Braden announced. Everyone looked at him. “I like coffee, okay? I have a scale and all the various accessories at home. «Electronic scales are the hallmark of a real coffee freak. With the scales, Braden was able to measure the water and the coffee beans so that he could experiment with different proportions. This is a whole science. Coffee scales are accurate to a fraction of a gram.

Braden grinned and held up his hands helplessly. "I have no idea what the regions mean." There was silence. We avoided looking at James. Still, it's possible that Braden's valiant admission would be counted as heresy. "Is in Order' James replied. The floodgates opened. John and Jake didn't know the differences between each region either, nor did Daniel Burka. We drank coffee together all the time, but neither of us had ever admitted our lack of expertise.

Then Serah Giarusso, Blue Bottle's Customer Service Manager, snapped her fingers. "What are we doing in the cafes?" she asked. The baristas have to be there all the time customers be confronted with something similar to Braden: A Customer would like to buy coffee beans, but don't know exactly which ones.

From the vision to the concrete idea

James is a slow and deliberate speaker. He paused for a moment before answering. "The brewing method is very important," he said. "We train the baristas to ask customers a simple question: 'How do you make your coffee at home?" or some other method, the barista would recommend an appropriate coffee bean.

"How do you make your coffee at home ...?" Braden repeated. Everyone took notes. James started by outlining his vision: The online shop should be as welcoming and hospitable as the cafes. We felt we were on the right track.

The team spent the following day sketching out ideas for the online store. On Wednesday morning we had fifteen different proposed solutions. You can't test so many solutions on customers. Therefore, the team chose their favorite ones Alternatives out to the selection to limit The second proposed solution contained a lot of text that reflected the conversationsspiegelte that the baristas often run with customers. Finally, James decided on the third solution, which sorted the types of coffee according to the brewing method. So the question "How do you prepare your coffee at home?" Could be transferred to the computer screen.

The prototype is created

James had selected three competing ideas. Of which we should have a prototype draw up and test? The idea of ​​a website that looked like a coffee shop was the most appealing. Blue Bottle's aesthetic is famous; a dedicated website would be different from any other website on the market. We had to try the idea, but it wasn't compatible with the other proposed solutions. But these other solutions were just as fascinating. We couldn't decide.

So we decided to prototype all three. After all, we didn't need a functional website. To be real for our testing purposes act, each test online shop needed only a few screen pages. Working with the BlueBottle team, we used Keynote presentation software to create a series of slides that looked like three real websites. With a little ingenuity and without any programming effort, we made a prototype from these pages that our test customers could use.

On Friday, the team watched the customer interviews. Each test customer bought in several online shops. Blue Bottles three prototypes were placed between the competitor's websites. (In order not to give customers a clue, we gave each prototype a fantasy name.)

From sample to implementation

It started Pattern to emerge. The shop with the wooden shelves that everyone had pinned their hopes on? We thought the prototype was very beautiful, but customers found it "cheesy" and "untrustworthy." The other two prototypes performed far better. The design with the question "How do you prepare your coffee at home?" worked smoothly. And the text-laden design shocked us: customers actually read all of the text and all of the additional information that Blue Bottles provided voice and expertise breathed life into it. One customer said, "These people know about coffee."

James and the Blue Bottle team formed Trust. They were a lot closer to defining how their online shop should work. Above all, they had achieved this in a way that corresponded to their principle of welcoming hospitality. They believed the online store could be a truly authentic Blue Bottle experience. A few months later, Blue Bottle launched their new website, and that has doubled from there growth in online sales.

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