Co-creating an agile experimentation bootcamp with Telia

Together with Telia, a major telecommunications operator in the Nordic-Baltic countries we put our heads together and co-created a 2-week experimentation bootcamp. 

The 2-week bootcamp came out of the need to give teams a chance to dig into problems deeper, to run more experiments away from the daily hustle & bustle of their jobs. More validation, less guesswork.

• Type: Experimentation Bootcamp
• People: 41 (+satellite members)
• Teams: 4
• Facilitators/mentors: 3
• External speakers: 5
• Duration: 10 days
• Prep work time: 1.5 months

It all started with the idea collection, followed by idea pitches. We helped Telia to select the teams that would benefit the most from the 2-week model. Then, to make sure that the participants start-off on the right foot, we facilitated individual team sessions to discuss the experiments they would want to pursue and set them on the right path even before the two weeks commenced. To be prepared is half the victory.  

Our challenge from then on was to find the most relevant mentors and speakers, as well as to prepare content that matched the needs of the 4 participating teams because one size fits no-one.

Now onto the 2 weeks themselves. We set up base and kicked things off in a location away from the main office, at one of Telia’s premises. Telia redecorated the whole floor with a common discussion area and team war-rooms, where they could have enough work and wall space to play around with papers and post-its.

For two weeks, the teams took initiative in running as many experiments as they could to find out customer needs based on their challenge. They were tackling challenges ranging from onboarding new internet customers effectively, to improving web navigation & customer communication as well as testing out better notification systems. The focus was placed on data-based learning and not on gut feeling.

We also invited speakers & doers from startups and other corporations, who’ve gone through similar processes to share the tricks of the trade and motivate the teams when they’ve hit roadblocks. And as always, we were there every day to check-in, to guide & to challenge the teams.

It takes a village & we couldn’t have done the bootcamp without our trusted speakers & mentors.

• Ivo Viira / ex-Nokia, Product Head for Intelligence and Platform at Pipedrive
• Jordan Valdma / ex-Transferwise, co-founder at Producement
• Elizaveta Lebedeva / Data Scientist at Bolt
• Sven Kirsimäe / ex-Skype, ex-Pipedrive, Chief Architect at Lift99
• Agur Jõgi / ex-Skype, ex-Telia, ex-Bigbank, co-founder at askRobin
• Tiit Paananen / ex-Skype, ex-Pipedrive, co-founder of Põhjala and VP of Engineering at Veriff
• Liis Narusk / co-founder and Business Developer, Elevate
• Joao Rei / Business Developer, Elevate

The 2-week bootcamp culminated in a demo-day open to all Telia employees. The four teams shared what they worked on and what impact the bootcamp left on them individually & team-wide.

Here is some feedback from the participants themselves, “VUNK [bootcamp] brought us a customer-first mindset,” from now on “we’ll try to boost validation in our daily teams”.

Some teams even went as far as deciding that they will run their own team bootcamps to test and hack ideas quickly, commenting that “sitting in one room away from distraction was great for teamwork,” and that “having multidisciplinary teams gave us understanding on how other people work and what their daily tasks are”. As one Telia exec commented, “Just having these discussions shows the [innovation] maturity of the team at Telia.” We think that is pretty cool.

Tired of guesswork? Stop reading, get in touch at hello@teamelevate.co