Management guru Peter Drucker said, “The customer rarely buys what the company thinks it’s selling.”
I think it’s very true as many times we misunderstand how our products and services can change our customers lives, one way or the other.
Are you really sure you understand why your customers buy your products ? Forget about the dashboards and reports … go talk to them.
I have a headache whenever the startup founder(s) tell me they are starting a platform business, and their products are like Uber of XXX, or Airbnb of YYY. Ooops.
I am still not sure why people believe platform play is easy, and also somehow believe their (small) companies are as good as Uber or Airbnb. In fact, most of them don’t even understand the different platform business models, and don’t know what they are doing as well as why they are doing that.
So, here is it, the main digital platform business models, for their reference.
“Let’s use dot-voting to pick the brightest idea !!”
“Let’s use dot-voting to pick the next task to work on !!”
It’s colorful, and it’s fun to use, isn’t it ? Most innovation and design workshops use dot-voting, but frankly this tool frustrates me a lot.
Reasons being in most workshops the facilitator is not experienced enough to group the ideas / tasks and then asks the equally inexperienced workshop participants to make hasty business or product decisions, with risks of familiarity bias and popularity bias.
If you have to do a voting, I would suggest to use quadratic voting method with online tools like Mentimeter.
Further reading : What’s Wrong with Dot Voting Exercises
Granted, it’s important to understand customers’ pain-points if you want to create an innovative product. It’s also important to gather a group of experts to ideate solutions, build a prototype and test it … the usual innovation processes.
However, in reality, many times off-target customers were invited and irrelevant insights were captured. Wrong group of experts were gathered and low-impact products were implemented. That’s the reasons why many workshops of Design Thinking, Design Sprint, Brainstorming etc. failed to deliver what were promised.
The better way is to understand the dynamics of your business, find out which types of business values and innovation you want to gain. Then find the right customers and groups of experts to help you to achieve this, before organising the workshop.
Many claim their “innovations” create jobs.
Others claim they lost their jobs due to “innovation”.
Who’s right ? Who’s wrong ?
What would innovation guru Prof. Clayton Christensen say ?
M.Y. Lessons Learnt 