Creating a digital product your customers love is hard. Simply adding digital features to a product typically fails to maximize the value of digital capabilities. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve found using a digital product to be frustrating or annoying. I’m guessing you’ve had your own bad experiences. No doubt the designers of these products thought they had succeeded in creating a great product.
Covid has accelerated the need to rapidly design and deliver disruptive digital products. I’ve had the privilege of working with many great companies facilitating digital product innovation workshops. This series of posts highlights a few of the key principles I work with clients on to develop breakthrough product concepts.
Digitizing vs. Born Digital
In the auto industry Tesla re-imagined how a car connects with customers by designing a digital product its customers love. A digital product that is also a car. Meanwhile, traditional brands responded to Tesla by adding digital features to their existing models. Their approach was digitizing. Tesla is now valued at more than all other car companies combined.
When Apple launched the iPod, it didn’t invent the MP3 player, it re-imagined the experience. It did the same thing when designing the iPhone. Over the years, disruptive digital products have successfully re-imagined the experience by focusing on a specific set of customer outcomes and working backward to design the product to deliver those outcomes.
To create winning new digital products customers love, we must first understand the outcomes that matter to our future customers. Then we must re-imagine how we can deliver the outcome using emerging technologies while at the same time sparking joy within each customer.
It takes a leap of imagination to get there. And product teams need to think differently.
Go beyond great customer experiences
The app store is littered with digital products with great experiences that very few people use consistently. If you’re like me, you’ve probably downloaded tens or even hundreds of such apps over the years. For too many the story is the same: After an initial test, the app experience feels really good! Yet, after using it a few times, we eventually stop using it. Why?
Because the experience, as good as it was, did not create sufficient value for us to invest your time in using it. Even free apps are not truly free because customers must give up their most precious resource to use them … their time.
To design a disruptive digital product your customers will love, and continue to use, it’s not enough to design a great experience simply by finding what about an experience causes customers pain and making it better. Unfortunately, this is where many product teams focus.
I’m going to lay out a clear set of steps you can take to begin designing disruptive products your customers will love … and keep using.
- The first step requires you to truly understand your customer
- Step two: Create an outcome journey map
- Step three: Overlay perceived value gained and lost
- Step four: Disruptive Ideation
0 Comments