LifeTuner: How AARP Came to Serve Twentysomethings

(page 2 of 2)

hiring freeze led Ty to outsource

Ty also drew on ethnographic research, including video of young adults using a LifeTuner prototype. (Robert Fabricant, creative vice-president of creative at Frog Design, also stresses the power of ethnographies: "I've never walked into a boardroom, thrown down a story with a powerful anecdote, and not had the executives latch onto it," he says.)

Even after winning board approval, Ty faced hurdles. For starters, a hiring freeze prevented her from staffing up the project. After crunching numbers, Ty was able to prove that by outsourcing the project, she could cut costs by 12.5% in 2008 and a further 5% in 2009. In July 2008, she hired First 30 Services, a San Francisco-based consultancy focused on startups; First 30 hired all the subcontractors, scaling the project team up and down as needed.

Outsourcing did more than save money: It freed Ty's team from AARP's sometimes cumbersome development processes, its "meetings culture," office politics, and the ideas that over the years become deeply rooted within organizations as to how things must be done. Ty attended the meetings and ran interference.

More than three years after Ty took on the project, LifeTuner finally launched. "In the first two days, we exceeded all of our traffic expectations," says Ty, adding that daily traffic since Oct. 27 has been exceeding the total traffic over the six month-period between its soft launch in early May and the public launch last month. (AARP won't reveal specific traffic numbers, nor will it say how much it invested in the LifeTuner project.) It's still early for LifeTuner and Ty knows that if AARP underfunds the site, it might not thrive. But for an organization in which innovation has struggled to take root, LifeTuner's debut is a significant achievement.

What can executives learn from AARP's LifeTuner?

Cut out the middle man. Side step as much hierarchy as possible. For Ty, reporting directly to the CEO immediately increased LifeTuner's chance of survival.

Fly under the radar. Limited resources or differing ideas about what an organization should be focusing on can lead coworkers to sabotage a project. Sometimes the fewer people who know about a project, the safer it is.

Build support. Your core team needs to include voices from across the organization, both to win allies and to avoid potential problems down the road. In addition, work informally with people from other teams when you see overlapping interests.

Work remotely. Many an innovative project has been downed by the politics, bureaucracy, and culture of an organization, as the predecessor to Lockheed Martin (LMT) knew when it created its renowned Skunk Works in 1943.

Jessie Scanlon is the senior writer for Innovation & Design at BusinessWeek, where she covers the intersection of design and business.

Business Exchange

Track and share business topics across the Web.