Month: July 2020

Risky Businesses

We are all in risky businesses, especially now all companies are expecting decrease in revenue and earnings. You would probably wonder how to avoid all the risks ahead, however I believe we all should prepare for a strong response and recovery, if it’s not too late.

It’s however not a small feast and therefore some guidances are always useful … The 3 phases and 6 dimensions of resilience, as well as the investment priorities cover in the following article are really good references.

BCG : The Digital Path to Business Resilience

Do The Right Things

Many product teams roll out their Minimum Viable Products (MVP) with an aim to test the market and then to “continuously improve” the product to make it work.

However, one of the important goals of rolling out MVP is actually to test the market and then to abandon certain features, such that the team can focus on the right things but not the wrong ones.

Great Customer Journey

“Let’s create a great customer journey!”, we all heard about this before in various design / project meetings.

My point is, we cannot create a journey for our customers, but can only facilitate the customers to create a great journey by themselves … and each of these journeys is different.

One trap we keep falling into, is we think customers start their journeys from one end, and then end in another end, flawlessly.

In reality, each customer has his / her own journey with us from any touchpoint we are offering, to another touchpoint with or without a successful journey / transaction / interaction. The customer will just bounce back and forth among various touchpoints we developed for them. Therefore, the team shall design a whole customer journey WEB or MAP, instead of just a simple one-direction customer journey.

#digitaltransformation

The Very First Question …

Many companies embark on their innovation journey by creating an Innovation department, hire a new chief / geek to lead the team, renovate the office to make it cozy and colourful, employ a new design methodology etc. etc.

What we really shall do first however is to abandon things … aged old mindset, archaic thinking, obsoleted KPIs, and organizational red tape.

What’s your take ?

Fail Fast ?

“Fail fast and learn fast” may be true, but it’s a bit too cliche, isn’t it ?

Every product team says they shall ship quickly with a MVP, and it shall be a team culture where people have the freedom to fail, such that with each failure the team can learn something that enables success.

However, to encourage product team to try and learn, the key is not about failing fast but to fail (if you have to) with a minimal cost. So how can we lower the cost of failure ?

The answer is a combination of cloud based infrastructure, API / microservices technology, data sandbox, UI / UX prototyping tool, agile development, group of targeted beta testers, robust security framework and relevant KPIs.

Let’s fail fast, and learn faster.