Member Article

Make something that people want

The amount of choice and quality available to customers is forcing organisations to rethink the way they deliver products and services. It’s no longer good enough to assume that if you build it they will come. Customers are no longer prepared to wait for a perfect solution; they expect organisations to not only excite them, but also deliver new things quickly, which meet their needs. Organisations must be able to not only respond to customer’s needs, but also become dedicated to continually uncovering and delivering value for customers, and their shareholders.

Trying to achieve too much too soon

Most organisations fail to realise success due to a focus on perfection whilst spreading themselves too thinly. They attempt to solve world problems rather than understanding what people really need. Linear plans are produced, with an aim of building the final polished solution, which limits their ability to learn or to evolve the product and the service based on early customer usage and adoption.

Failure to leverage customer insight

An organisation’s greatest asset is its data, but most struggle to understand what questions they are looking to answer from it. These failures hinder the organisation’s ability to unlock hidden value from the various customer interactions. Opportunities to make improvements are missed, and in some cases customer comments are completely ignored and enhancements are subsequently delivered based on what the organisation thinks the customer wants rather than what the customer really wants.

Sacrificing quality for speed

Pressure to beat the competition results in products and services, which although delivered early, are low in quality. More focus is given to reaching a project milestone, and completing a task rather than focusing on delivering a capability that is of a good standard and which fulfils a basic customer need. Failures in delivering a quality product or service impacts the short term potential for customer adoption and the longer term market growth.

Leverage data assets - beat the competition

Established companies that hold on to their traditional products and services are struggling to stay ahead. To succeed in today’s marketplace, organisations must focus on extracting significantly more value from their existing data assets. Leveraging existing data sources – both internal and external – to provide key customer insights must be an immediate priority if organisations want to stave off the disruptive threat posed by new entrants into the market and ensure that market share is retained, but also value is not unnecessarily lost.

Teams do not equal collaboration

Separate departments, red tape and practice areas within organisations, and their various suppliers, hinder people from being able to work together. Due to the disparate nature of teams, and their siloed ways of working, a single task focus is adopted instead of common understanding and approach. This causes inconsistencies when things are eventually integrated, impacts the organisation’s ability to consistently and effectively respond to customer demands and eventually stifles innovation.

Building things that no one wants

Historically, organisations have taken an inward looking view of what people actually need, and end up building a rocket ship, when what was really required was something much simpler. Vast amounts of time and money are poured into completely resolving a perceived product or service gap. Vast amounts of features are created, with no way of tracing if these were actually needed in the first place.

Keep things simple for customers & business

Even if a product does solve every problem 94% of people abandon it because they find it difficult to use. The key to delivering value is to focus on things people need right now, and deliver high quality, simple things that meet these needs. This helps build customer trust, but also enables organisations to incrementally fulfil new customer needs. Importantly it also avoids complication, which forces them to focus on delivering things that people will actually be able to use.

Focus on the destination

To create a meaningful product or service the focus must be fixed on the end destination. Rather than build a complex rigid plan, with lots of assumptions, a much more flexible value driven plan is created, which allows for constant adjustments based on early customer use and adoption. Through the various early incremental deliveries of features, organisations are able to generate value but also quickly learn what works and what doesn’t, enabling them to determine if they need to completely change direction or continue on their current path.

Customer and Business value

Customers and shareholders are demanding value on a daily basis; with so much competitive pressure it is crucial for organisations to be able to reduce product and services failures. This can only be realised through listening to customers, collaborating as a team, and focusing on delivering the minimum needed to deliver real value. This helps organisations to evaluate signals from early adoption, enabling them to not only deliver customer and business value, but also determine if they need to either evolve their products and services or change their strategy based on the needs of the customer and the business.

www.liveworkstudio.com

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Mike Clark .