We help leaders of new initiatives and innovations turn bold ideas and research insights into commercially viable projects by getting your boss, teammates, and customers as excited about and invested in your new idea as you are.
Mission
Our mission is to turn more people with great ideas into leaders of important new initiatives that improve the prosperity, quality of life, and longevity for the people who build, purchase, use, and operate these new products and services.
We help leaders across 3 dimensions:
Commercialize your innovation: Understand what end users and customers want to do and hear if they are going to say “yes” to your innovation.
Align around your vision: Build internal messaging strategies and a data repository to to get buy-in and strategic alignment from bosses, teammates, and direct reports.
Find the next big thing: Identify new markets for existing products and opportunities to develop new innovations their current markets will be excited to use and purchase.
Vision
Our vision for the future is that the planetesimal ideas coalescing in the heads of brilliant visionaries today will become real innovations tomorrow at least in part because the work we will do together.
Our vision will be realized if we can look back on our time working as innovation strategists and say that the support we had the privilege of giving new leaders led to more new products, services, and programs that help people live longer, happier, healthier, more prosperous lives with more time spent with their loved ones.
Who we work with: Leaders of bold new initiatives
We can work together if you are inside an existing organization or if you are working independently of an established institution. The shape of our our work will vary depending on your orientation to the people you need to get on board. We usually work with:
- CEOs and Founders of groundbreaking new organizations – and leaders who have just joined stepped into a leadership role and want to align an existing team around a new strategic direction
- Internal executives leading new initiatives, launching new products or services, or introducing new ideas to their organizations
- Solo founders and leaders of small, independent teams working on new companies and initiatives
Outcomes we get: More people saying “Yes”
“Yes” means different things in different conversations. Before your customers can say “Yes” by buying your product, your coworkers need to say “Yes” by showing up to build your vision. Before they can build your vision, they need to say “Yes, I understand what we are doing and want to be a part of your vision,” by making time on their calendars and asking questions about how they can help build what you see.
We help you translate your vision into what your stakeholders need to hear so they can say their version of “Yes”, which might sound like:
- Buy-in from your direct report, boss, and teammates
- Strategic Alignment among your colleagues and supporters
- Faster Build Cycles from teams that know what types or projects to prioritize and why
- Faster and Higher Margin Sales Cycles from customers who instantly “get it” without losing years trying to find the right messaging and positioning
- Greater Adoption among users and customers who understand your initiative will help them – and decide to start and continue using it
How we do it: Build a Foundation for Innovation Excellence and Long-Term Growth
If you’ve ever worked on someone else’s vision, you know how hard it is to make progress when you don’t really know what the vision is. You know what it’s like to have to make your best guess about what part of the founder’s vision is most important to work on now. You know how common it is for you and your teammates to think you’re solving problems for the same type of customer only to realize right before you ship that one hand doesn’t seem to know what the other is doing.
But chaotic, sluggish, misaligned teams are not inevitable stages of innovation or growth. But these types of working environments are the inevitable result of innovation launched on a shaky foundation.
We help leaders build a foundation that gives you an organized, fast, and strategically aligned team.
That means collaborating to:
- Define a clear vision and mission for what you want to build and how the future will look different as a result of your new innovation
- Mobilize your vision and message across your organization so every person playing a role in its success understands exactly what it means and how to work toward making it a reality
- Collect qualitative user research so you know exactly where, when, and how people who buy, use, or consume the output of your vision are struggling today and how they want to make progress tomorrow
- Facilitate your team’s understanding of user research so every person building your vision understands the full context of who they’re building for, what they’re building, and why
- Build an innovation charter, aka a product and messaging brief to guide your team in making decisions with the level of detail your executives, middle managers, independent contributors, and contractors will need to be able to design experiences and write messages that get your target users and customers on board
- Write and design the experiences of use and of purchase that your new users have when you are introducing them to your new innovation so you can close more deals and increase adoption of by end users
- Lead your team to execute your vision as a fully embedded fractional leader to support you leading a team of humans to turn your innovation into reality – giving you the opportunity to stay focused on the building work of your actual innovation
Who we are: About Alli
Hypothesis Department is led by Alli Blum, a “skills generalist” who works through a “problem-specialized” lens to help leaders get new innovations get off the ground.
Alli’s background includes:
- Launching a fintech product from 0-1, turning it into a powerhouse sales enablement tool, bringing it out of beta, and growing it to many thousands of enterprise users
- Developing the commercialization and messaging strategy that led to 10x growth for a tool in an emerging category
- Landing front-page media coverage in the Wall Street Journal
- Mobilizing voice-of-customer programs at 6 organizations and training 100 team leaders on how to mobilize qualitative research at their organization
- Departmental experience as a copywriter, UX designer, marketer, PR strategist, product manager, team coach, engineer, and team leader
- Tenures with startups, established technology organizations, and research institutions
- Speaking and advising at conferences, accelerators, and universities on how to tell stories that turn more strangers into raving fans
Alli has also nurtured a deep network of industry experts across disciplines to provide additional specialized technical expertise when necessary.
Why we do what we do:
Like many a bleeding heart millennial, raised on the promise of changing the world, only to find things more complicated than schoolwork made them out to be, Alli entered corporate America with the naive conviction that she would be able to change everything – if only.
“If only I had more skills, if only I had more authority, if only the idea was better, if only, if only, if only.”
One day, she had the opportunity to lead a new product from 0-1. To make all those decisions I wanted to make not in the right department, not in the right leadership seat, but in the right moment in time.
The structural advantages innovations have when they are built on solid foundations cannot be beat.
The best way to have a big impact is to be there at the start of something.