You may have come across the term minimum viable test within the context of lean and agile methodologies.

A minimum viable test is the antithesis to the traditional, everything-at-once, waterfall approach to marketing project delivery. This more agile approach is the fastest way to get feedback from customers and prospects and should be the foundation of most modern marketing teams.

How waterfall project delivery became the norm

The ideas surrounding waterfall project management (and task-based systems) dates back to Frederick Winslow Taylor's work in the early 1900s. This was the time of mass production and the 2nd industrial revolution - car manufacturing, steel and tobacco production. These industries involved processes that were repeated many thousands of times, well-defined problems, and clearly understood solutions.

Taylor's theory, known as Scientific Management, and what we now consider waterfall methodology, centred around the idea that dividing work into standardised discrete tasks was the key to increasing process and project efficiency.

Waterfall methodology argues the best thing to do with projects such as these is to decompose the project into a series of individual tasks, assign each task to a functional specialist and work through a series of steps towards the end deliverable.

Waterfall project delivery follows a series of steps, executed in a linear fashion one after the other. The steps are typically Planning, Design, Implementation, Testing and Deployment.

For a marketing campaign this may look like:

• Planning - Discuss campaign theme and objectives at a high-level

• Design - Understand individual assets required (content, graphics, landing page & ad creation, tools, nurture sequences, analytics etc)

• Implementation - Creation of the above assets, including design and development work

• Testing - Ensure everything works as planned, test user journey, device types, translations etc

• Launch - Push live and launch to prospects and customers

To this day, Taylor's ideas still form the bedrock of the modern capitalist economy and are very much alive in global workplace culture. His thinking permeates virtually all management thinking to this day.

The problem with waterfall project delivery

Taylor is responsible for the way most people see work, teams, and leadership today. At the same time his theories stand in the way of many corporate innovation and transformation efforts.

The problem with task-based systems is that they work best for predictable, frequently recurring projects. In other words, waterfall planning only really works where there is certainty around the problem and the solution.

Unfortunately today's marketers and marketing teams, and increasingly other business functions as well, operate under conditions of extreme uncertainty and constant change. Customers and audiences are changing, experiences and expectations are changing, acquisition channels are changing, company strategy and messaging is changing. In this kind of environment your marketing plan very quickly becomes less of a "plan" and more a case of "build it and see what happens".

The most common outcome when using waterfall project planning in conditions of uncertainty is the successful execution of a bad plan. Eric Ries, renowned author and coach of lean methodology, refers to this as "achieving failure".

In marketing this typically takes the form of a campaign that is on time, on budget and beautifully executed. All campaign planning and tasks are completed perfectly. Regular updates show everything to be on-track, and yet the end result is no increase in lead generation or revenue.

Marketers need to reduce the risk of spending time and money on content that people don't read, and on campaigns people don't engage with. If we create something nobody wants, does it matter if we do it on time and on budget?

In my experience marketers have a tendency to over-build. Big bang equals big risk. You build the thing until it's 100% done and deliver it to the user at the very end.

What is needed is an approach to reduce the uncertainty by getting early market feedback from prospects and customers.

Why marketers need the minimum viable test (MVT)?

The solution where the outcome is unpredictable is a more agile approach, and the minimum viable test. Software developers call it Agile. The manufacturing industry calls it Lean. Designers call it Design Thinking. Entrepreneurs call it the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Marketers call it Experimentation or Agile Marketing. Additionally, you may hear terms and phrases such as lean sprints, growth sprints and agile sprints.

Regardless, all of these methodologies essentially describe the exact same thing - an incremental and iterative approach to project delivery where you test your assumptions as quickly as possible.

• Iterative - don't try to get it all right from the beginning

• Incremental - don't build it all at once

With traditional waterfall projects all of the value delivery to users comes right at the end of the project. The goal with the minimum viable test is to bring forward user value delivery as early as possible, and to iterate from there. Think of it like trial-and-error marketing, where the team that finds the errors the fastest wins.

To summarise, try to simplify your marketing ideas. Rather than jumping in with a big complex idea or campaign, start with a small and simple test. Once the test is launched, then gather feedback and iterate your way to a more successful, sustainable, and scalable marketing strategy.