“I have not failed. I have just found 10,000 ways that won’t work”
Thomas Edison failed innumerable times before developing the first working incandescent lightbulb.
If you are not failing, you are not learning
What impact is an evolving digital society having on financial services?
Customer expectations of the digital experience have been accelerated by the pandemic and their experiences with other organisations that are delivering digital services.1 These expectations are here to stay and we know that meeting and exceeding them is a must to remaining relevant to our customers.
At MetLife we recognise that experimentation is our pathway to continually improving our business and the experience of our customers.
And we know experimentation and failure go together. To experiment means you must be ready to embrace failure. And every failure is an opportunity to learn. You have to get comfortable with (sometimes) admitting you got it wrong when the data does not support your hypothesis, your opinion, or your expert judgement.
But…done right, experiments never fail. If you are not failing, you are not learning.
Exercising the experimentation muscle
Experimentation helps us gather facts and data to inform our business decisions and ultimately deliver better products and experiences for our customers.
To help the MetLife team flex their experimentation muscles, we’re giving MetLife employees the chance to pitch their experimentation ideas. These are quick, easy ideas that are designed to test a hypothesis. Teams who ‘pitch’ their ideas must clearly demonstrate the business opportunity and what the experiment will test. Experiments can come from any area of the business and no idea is a bad idea.
If a pitch is successful and meets the criteria then the team are given the go ahead to on the experiment and are given the support they need, including in some cases some funding.
This gives our people the chance to think differently about solving business problems, with a test and learn approach through experimentation, and helps them get comfortable with trying things that might fail.
Ultimately, we also hope that some of these experiments lead to something even bigger and better.
The future is digital, the future is now
As the industry and our customer evolve, we must continue to evolve with them. The future is here now. Experimentation helps us ensure we are able take advantage of the opportunities of a digital society and help our customer build a more confident future.
Arti Kumar
Head of Platform & Delivery
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