Experience sucks.
Will at Waye raises a great point... a potential client is entitled to ask what the hell your experience does for their business today.
So first off, a bit of context
I've been following Waye for a while, not least because I love Will's acerbic, direct takes on our industry but also because a lot of what he says rings true.
Of course these posts are deliberately provocative, (ahem! engagement), yet in the B2B space, where there is so much mundanity and conformity, it's a bit like shooting fish in a barrel.
But when I stumbled on his post "your experience doesn't matter" I suddenly went from nodding approval, to feeling like one of those fish in the barrel.
Of course I did what any self respecting professional does, I responded on LinkedIn with a semi annoyed piffy joke about launching the 124th ever Shopify store. But really it was a fairly efficient demonstration of why that post had hit a nerve.
History and experience are an integral part of the Inspira's story, yet Will raises a great point... A potential client is entitled to ask what the hell that history does for their business today.
So, is experience still relevant?
For us experience becomes a problem when familiarity with an old approach stops us considering a better one.
My view is that experience is a double edge sword.
Hold on and trade off it too tightly and you become an outdated, slow and irrelevant incumbant. However, if you use it's lessons whilst maintaining the spirit of curiosity and experimentation. Then, I'd argue, you make better decisions, avoid expensive mistakes and reach more useful results with less effort.
Will argues that experience has a half-life, an interesting idea and one I fully agree with.
But really, this has always been true.
It's just the pace of change is making this window (alot) shorter. Will rather kindly suggests it's 18 months before we cast that experience out as ancient history. But I'd argue for anyone closely embedded with and using these tools, you'll probably agree that it's perhaps closer to 3-6 months.
For us experience only becomes a problem when familiarity with an old approach stops us considering a better one. But it remains incredibly valuable when we question an assumption, or recognise a costly dependency or realise a project is larger than the problem warrants.
Being young, fresh and provocative alone doesn't settle that distinction.
Systems built several years ago may still serve a business well, but equally, that doesn't mean it can't be better, it just means improvements need to carry the burden of proof and risk mitigation.
The changing cost of experience...
For a brand, the cost of using an agency also includes finding one. It's all another form of friction.
For a brand, the cost of using an agency also includes finding one, explaining the business, agreeing the scope, reviewing the work and managing the handover.
It's all another form of friction, friction the new AI tools are eradicating at a increasing rate. It means the transmission of context (which is practically the entire agency model) is compressing. This is especially true when an internal leader, who understands their business, can execute perhaps 5 of the steps you used to do as part of your delivery.
Shopify is moving at pace in this area and already gives merchants ways to generate content, complete tasks and build certain admin apps through Sidekick and AI chat.
This means the range of work an internal team can effectively take on is getting broader.
How we are optmising...
We've been connecting the context of our work with AIt's helping us reach conclusions faster, refine possible solutions more thoroughly, across both strategy and execution.
At Inspira, we've seen this change early and as a result we've been connecting the context of our work with AI: information from stores, client meetings, proposals and ideas into a central shared context, informed by our years of hands on practicle experience.
It's helping us reach conclusions faster, refine possible solutions more thoroughly, across both strategy and execution.
It's also changing how we work through problems.
Experience informs the questions we ask and the options we assess. The tools help us execute faster and more effectively. For our clients, it means they get answers (and critically) results, quicker and with less friction.
Importantly we understand that brands can and are developing this capability internally too. This means we understand that for us to be a useful external resource, we should be able to hop on the mission, quickly and with minimal fuss.
Brands expectations are becoming more focused...
More than ever the business case, i.e. the pure mathematics of the endeavour are under much more intense scrutiny than historically.
Whether teams are opting to optimise, bring more of their operation onto Shopify or see Shopify as the de-facto place to base a new business channel.
The common theme is that the business case, i.e. the pure mathematics of the endeavour, are under much more intense scrutiny than they were historically. It means if you're not tooling up to remove friction, onboard fast and deliver results, then you're likely to loose out to those who are.
Some recent work with Alvio on Holiday Extras illustrates this commercial starting point. Inspira rapidly designed it's new travel store, connecting participating suppliers connected through Alvio. The result is a focus range of products organised around travellers' needs and different types of trip. Historically this would have encountered much more friction, yet this was organised and ready to go in weeks not months.
Experience has value, it's just nuanced
what is common sense other than learned and repeated experience by another name...
So there is still huge value in experience, but crucially it lies in making the work more focused and the outcome more useful, not lamenting on past largely irrelevant glories.
Right now as I write this (of course with the help of AI) this becomes particularly relevant just before peak.
Becuase even though new technology can make it easier to introduce changes, the trading calendar will still put hard physical limits how much change a team can and should absorb. Especially just before th busiest operational period.
You can argue, well, that's just common sense. Well yes it is, but what is common sense other than learned and repeated experience by another name.
We're all learning, some faster than others...
AI shopping, UCP, daily platform updates, most this stuff by all accounts only became available about an hour ago...
The full effects of AI shopping, UCP (Univresal Commerce Protocol), daily platform updates and new features are yet to fully play out. Progress is veering into a pace that outstrips most everyones capacity to absorb it.
All of this means the majority of people in and around this crazy technologically disrupted industry, dispite what they might say, are working this shit out on the hoof.
Everyone is learning and no one is learning fast enough.
Not least because by all accounts, it feels like most of this only became available about an hour ago.
Wrapping it up...
Our bet us that actual practical experience, commercial examples of outcomes and a willingness to tinker with the tools, are going to make teams with lived experience disproportionately more value to work with.
While we are proud of where we started, it's true much of implimentation from that 17+ year period isn't directly relevant today.
What is though, are the lessons we've learned, the mistakes we've made and the fact the same culture of experimentation and curiosity, that lead us to build the 124th ever Shopify store on the platform, means we are at the very forefront of using these new tools to help give our clients the advantage.
