7 principles to free our minds from perfect execution fallacy

True innovation — the journey of creating and distributing outstanding new-to-the-world customer value — is critical to the success of every modern business. In times of increasing disruptive threads, immensely decreasing company life spans and sped-up adoption rates, innovation activities have become a crucial precondition for survival. Simply put, if we don’t innovate, our business will become obsolete eventually.

»Innovation is not a business strategy — it’s a survival capability!«

And yet, a lot of companies are willing to innovate but are rarely able to practice it. They invest enormous…

Since the early 90s, when the term User Experience was brought to wider knowledge, the UX design profession has been dealing with a lot of key challenges. Besides new emerging roles accompanied by an increasing amount of new — and sometimes rather confusing — job titles, UX has mainly been struggling with its role in the product development process as much as with its influence and impact in large product organisations.

In many cases, designers struggle to speak the language of business, struggle to communicate the value of great User Experience to the management level and fail to have real…

People don’t want to buy products. They want to hire products to get a job done. Or as Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt puts it: »People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!«. People often do things because they find themselves with a problem they would like to solve — such as overcoming a boring commute, recovering from a stressful day or hanging framed photos on the wall. When people struggle they look out for solutions to achieve a progress in their lives. The Job-To-Be-Done framework has become popular in product design to uncover…

Great digital products don’t suddenly appear out of nowhere. In fact, they are sophisticated artifacts that have successfully grown into great products after a careful product discovery process. They are delightful experiences, easy to use, and beautiful to look at, providing outstanding value to its users.

“Building a great product is an art as much as a science.” — Paul Adams

The vast majority of products fail during the discovery process or shortly after launch. Either they fail at providing a meaningful user value, people do not use them frequently or the number of users does not grow properly. Few…

When thinking of User Experience, we often think of a simple, beautiful, and easy to use feature-set of a product, that makes the user’s life easier. But as a matter of fact, features are merely a small, fragile part of the product. They are only a few of many thinkable solutions for a user’s problem the product tries to solve. Thinking in products means thinking in specific user’s problems, in jobs to be done, in goals, and in revenues.

The core user experience is not a set of features; in fact, it is the job users hire the product for…

Our work methods are changing and so are we