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A LEAN STARTUP IN GOVERNMENT?
On July 21, 2010, President Obama signed the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act into law. One of its landmark provisions created a new federal agency, the Consumer Federal Protection Bureau (CFPB). This agency is tasked with protecting American citizens from predatory lending by financial services companies such as credit card companies, student lenders, and payday loan offices. The plan calls for it to accomplish this by setting up a call center where trained case workers will field calls directly from the public.
Left to its own devices, a new government agency would probably hire a large staff with a large budget to develop a plan that is expensive and time-consuming. However, the CFPB is considering doing things differently. Despite its $500 million budget and high-profile origins, the CPFB is really a startup.
President Obama tasked his chief technology officer, Aneesh Chopra, with collecting ideas for how to set up the new startup agency, and that is how I came to be involved. On one of Chopra’s visits to Silicon Valley, he invited a number of entrepreneurs to make suggestions for ways to cultivate a startup mentality in the new agency. In particular, his focus was on leveraging technology and innovation to make the agency more efficient, cost-effective, and thorough.
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My suggestion was drawn straight from the principles of this chapter: treat the CFPB as an experiment, identify the elements of the plan that are assumptions rather than facts, and figure out ways to test them. Using these insights, we could build a minimum viable product and have the agency up and running—on a micro scale—long before the official plan was set in motion.
The number one assumption underlying the current plan is that once Americans know they can call the CFPB for help with financial fraud and abuse, there will be a significant volume of citizens who do that. This sounds reasonable, as it is based on market research about the amount of fraud that affects Americans each year. However, despite all that research, it is still an assumption. If the actual call volume differs markedly from that in the plan, it will require significant revision. What if Americans who are subjected to financial abuse don’t view themselves as victims and therefore don’t seek help? What if they have very different notions of what problems are important? What if they call the agency seeking help for problems that are outside its purview?
Once the agency is up and running with a $500 million budget and a correspondingly large staff, altering the plan will be expensive and time-consuming, but why wait to get feedback? To start experimenting immediately, the agency could start with the creation of a simple hotline number, using one of the new breed of low-cost and fast setup platforms such as Twilio. With a few hours’ work, they could add simple voice prompts, offering callers a menu of financial problems to choose from. In the first version, the prompts could be drawn straight from the existing research. Instead of a caseworker on the line, each prompt could offer the caller useful information about how to solve her or his problem.
Instead of marketing this hotline to the whole country, the agency could run the experiment in a much more limited way: start with a small geographic area, perhaps as small as a few city blocks, and instead of paying for expensive television or radio advertising to let people know about the service, use highly targeted advertising. Flyers on billboards, newspaper advertisements to those blocks, or specially targeted online ads would be a good start. Since the target area is so small, they could afford to pay a premium to create a high level of awareness in the target zone. The total cost would remain quite small.
As a comprehensive solution to the problem of financial abuse, this minimum viable product is not very good compared with what a $500 million agency could accomplish. But it is also not very expensive. This product could be built in a matter of days or weeks, and the whole experiment probably would cost only a few thousand dollars.
What we would learn from this experiment would be invaluable. On the basis of the selections of those first callers, the agency could immediately start to get a sense of what kinds of problems Americans believe they have, not just what they “should” have. The agency could begin to test marketing messages: What motivates people to call? It could start to extrapolate real-world trends: What percentage of people in the target area actually call? The extrapolation would not be perfect, but it would establish a baseline behavior that would be far more accurate than market research.
Most important, this product would serve as a seed that could germinate into a much more elaborate service. With this beginning, the agency could engage in a continuous process of improvement, slowly but surely adding more and better solutions. Eventually, it would staff the hotline with caseworkers, perhaps at first addressing only one category of problems, to give the caseworkers the best chance of success. By the time the official plan was ready for implementation, this early service could serve as a real-world template.
The CFPB is just getting started, but already they are showing signs of following an experimental approach. For example, instead of doing a geographically limited rollout, they are segmenting their first products by use case. They have established a preliminary order of financial products to provide consumer services for, with credit cards coming first. As their first experiment unfolds, they will have the opportunity to closely monitor all of the other complaints and consumer feedback they receive. This data will influence the depth, breadth, and sequence of future offerings.
As David Forrest, the CFPB’s chief technology officer, told me, “Our goal is to give American citizens an easy way to tell us about the problems they see out there in the consumer financial marketplace. We have an opportunity to closely monitor what the public is telling us and react to new information. Markets change all the time and our job is to change with them.”6
The entrepreneurs and managers profiled in this book are smart, capable, and extremely results-oriented. In many cases, they are in the midst of building an organization in a way consistent with the best practices of current management thinking. They face the same challenges in both the public and private sectors, regardless of industry. As we’ve seen, even the seasoned managers and executives at the world’s best-run companies struggle to consistently develop and launch innovative new products.
Their challenge is to overcome the prevailing management thinking that puts its faith in well-researched plans. Remember, planning is a tool that only works in the presence of a long and stable operating history. And yet, do any of us feel that the world around us is getting more and more stable every day? Changing such a mind-set is hard but critical to startup success. My hope is that this book will help managers and entrepreneurs make this change.
