About Moves the Needle
In the 2000s, not long after the Silicon Valley Dot.com bust, a diverse “movement” of minds emerged, with the aim of better addressing customer needs, improving products, and building more successful startups. The principles of Agile, Customer Development, Lean Startup, and Design thinking were among those that gathered momentum.
Moves the Needle (MTN) grew out of this movement. Founder Brant Cooper, coming straight from the startup world with experience in IT, marketing, and product management, wrote the bestselling books The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development and The Lean Entrepreneur. The books — and the movement, generally — were primarily focused on digital tech startups. These were literally the first companies in human history to experience “The Digital Age.”
The Great Recession, shook the corporate world. In many ways, it marked the end of the dominance of the Industrial Age defined by analog manufacturing, and the emergence of the Digital Age. The “movement” now significantly applied to corporates and Moves the Needle was born.
Fast forward a decade and digital dominates. COVID accelerated need and adoption. It’s no longer a futuristic disruption managed by corporate innovation groups, but rather a “digital transformation” that effects all aspects of corporations from HR groups to core Product teams.
Moves the Needle, recognizing this development early, developed programs not only for software startups or corporate innovtation teams, but for the entire organization. Over the last decade MTN has helped over 70 large organizations, including some of the biggest brands in the world. Their work spans HR, Finance, Legal, Marketing, Sales, M&A, Products and Innovation. They’ve worked across industries who never believed they could be agile or customer-centric, including manufacturing, healthcare, chemicals, banking, insurance, and even back into tech.
MTN is a unique and leading voice in teaching organizations how to overcome uncertainty–big and small– using exploration skills. Rather than merely copying others, MTN “invented” and even coined their version of “Lean Innovation”, as a unique blend of human-centered design, rapid experimentation and agile practices.
Rather than being dogmatic about specific tools or frameworks, they are outcome-focused. While offering a specific set of programming, their services are tailored to meet companies “where they are” in their transformation journey. All work is coordinated around existing real business challenges or initiatives. Our goal is help you achieve desired outcomes.
Transformation requires behavior change. Our programs teach content where required, but focuses on “practicing” the behavior required to succeed. We work with teams doing the daily work, as well as the layers of leadership required to align efforts to organizational priorities.
When thinking of agencies or big consulting firms, you feel like “been there, done that”, we recommend giving a new way of working a try.