News & Views

• Insights

The New Agency Model Is All About Growth

When I started Vokal in 2009, our core service offering was mobile application development. We built great apps, and the client was responsible for the rest, which essentially was the marketing and distribution of the app.

That model actually worked great for a while, but as time passed, the mobile industry turned more Digital. The word “Digital” evolved to mean more than just building mobile apps, websites, and digital marketing; it turned into the results that the digital efforts provided.

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• Insights
• Design

Being Creative Can’t Mean Being Perfect (At Least, Not At First)

The creative process doesn’t look pretty. That is to say, as long as you’re doing it right. Only in fiction does a perfect work spring forth, fully formed, from the brilliant mind of the sole creator or the effortless fingers of the visionary craftsman.

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• Analytics
• Data
• Insights

The North Star Metric Approach to Growth

When MySpace was the leader in social networking, they never thought Facebook would catch up. But, there was a stark difference in how both of these companies operated, and it had everything to do with the different metrics they used to track their progress.

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• Insights

How Enterprise Product Managers Can Find Product-Market Fit

Product managers for enterprise companies have a lot more to deal with just creating an amazing product. What they also have to do is to get buy-in from the relevant stakeholders internally to ensure what they’re building is not just going to benefit the end user, but will benefit the executives and the organization itself.

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• Insights
• Data
• Analytics

The Foundation of Running Successful Digital Growth Experiments

I was motivated by a post on Reforge called Good Experiment, Bad Experiment in relation to growth, which was inspired by a classic post from Ben Horowitz on Good Product Manager / Bad Product Manager.

As a company, we’ve been running product experiments for a long time, and more recently, we’ve started doing more “digital growth experiments” with our clients. Digital experiments are still growth experiments but focused on larger organizations who struggle with moving from idea to product or service quickly.

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• Insights

Three Ways Your Company Can Obtain A Competitive Advantage Through Culture

There’s much more to a successful organization than simply perfecting your process and crafting a solid business model. Consider one of today’s most ubiquitous media enterprises Netflix, which states on its hiring page, “Our version of the great workplace is a dream team in pursuit of ambitious common goals.”

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• Insights

A Gated Approach to Innovation Experimentation

As we’ve run this experimentation model for our clients, I thought we would share our approach to running and managing growth experiments within companies.

The biggest failure of organizations is a lack of innovation. This is clear. But what is significantly less clear is exactly how to solve it.

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• Analytics
• Insights

The Biggest Threat To Restaurants Is Third-Party Delivery Apps. Here’s Why.

It’s a fact that for most restaurant owners, often already thin margins are generally made even thinner when partnering with delivery service apps. The likes of Caviar, Postmates, DoorDash, and others get by thanks to perpetual fees, with some businesses reporting their profitability has actually decreased as their delivery business has increased.

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• Insights

The Single Reason Why Companies Stop Innovating

If you look at companies like Blockbuster and Nokia, or even Sears, they were all considered innovators in their respective industries.

But then, seemingly overnight, the innovation stopped. Nokia engineers had an idea for a touch screen, web-enabled, color phone three years before the iPhone was released, but Nokia executives turned it down because they thought the idea was crazy and not achievable.

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• Analytics
• Data
• Insights

Five Steps to Avoid the Product Death Cycle and Shut Down the Feature Factory

John’s stomach churned. He just read the retention numbers on the iOS app he recently released. They were bad. Worse than ever before. He gazed out of his office window as if the answers were swirling in the wintery abyss above LaSalle Street. Hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless meetings, and for what?

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