The Themes They Are A Changing…

Thanks for stopping by. I want to use this as a place where I can write about the things that preoccupy me, the questions that nag away at me. Beneath the surface of markets, companies, and products, there are social, psychological, behavioural assumptions bubbling under. They usually don’t get a look in but they eventually turn into the trends and themes that underpin our intentions and actions. I find these fascinating in isolation, but now and then we notice that a particular product or service contains clashing assumptions, poorly explored user experiences, or unattractive social mechanics. I would like to use this place to draw your attention to such things.

At this stage, I would like to ask you to please remember, these are my opinions and not those of my employer, etc. etc.

Product Themes, Integrity of Vision, and Death by A Thousand Cuts

With all the Lean Start Up, lean development methodology, lean lean lean, I think people generally underplay the “why, why, why”. I usually start conversations with a statement such as “so what is it that you know about this market that nobody else knows” (totes stolen, I know), or “what kind of customer have you found that is so unusual” (again, I know, stolen). It’s because all the really great things I've ever come across have been based in someone seeing something rather simple, subtle, and true. The usual assumption is that they know these things because of their particular work or life journey, thus the “while building an application we noticed that it was really hard to get payments functionality working quickly and easily” (Stripe), or “while running our small mobile telecom company we noticed how difficult it was to manage false positives in fraud” (Trustev). The life journey story actually holds the assumption that this assumption is grounded in reality.

If you don’t know what market you are in, what exact segment you compete in, and what differentiating position you are seeking to claim, how do you expect to deliver a product or service that “does the job”?. A clear job, a whole job. This is where the subtle insight comes. The subtle insight gives you a why you can build on. In Stripe it was probably “it’s the developers, stupid” and that enabled them to focus everything else. Developers follow great developers and great developers like great code…. let’s go. The why can of course expand further, and further. Simon Sinek’s Ted Talk is good on this.

As has been noted elsewhere “more features” won’t get you there; “more iterations” based on customer feedback probably won’t get you there either. Indeed even if you do find awesome features, and very cool technologies, they can and will be copied super fast. There is a case for saying it’s often better not be first, but to be a fast second. Let the other player make the big mistakes. It’s far cheaper to follow than to lead. Perhaps a better question to ask is what whole job does our customer trust us to do for them. This, of course, is straight out the Clayton Christensen course ware.

So we have to think more deeply about strategic positions, and competitive differentiation if we want to win. This stuff starts with an understanding of what is happening in the marketplace, and right now, there are lots of things changing in the marketplace. Digital connections, mobile devices, sensor networks are examples of technology trends, but in some sense (sic) they also meet other trends such as the decline in all measures of trust in large organisations and institutions. The rise of “the sharing economy” probably has been enabled by mobile and social, but probably has as much to do with the average persons willingness to participate in order to win more marginal income in a time of average wage deflation. Where themes meet you probably have opportunity.

Product Themes

After much thinking about the contact centre market, and messaging, and having listened to what customers said about the company I work for we distilled feedback down to one word. Simple. Simple to understand. Simple to use. Simple to expand. Simplicity, not as a feature but as a theme. How could everything be simpler from “the offer” to “the onboarding”. When applied radically, we reduced “things the new user has to learn” to about three. There are other themes, such as mobile, and visual, which when pushed to their ultimate conclusions enabled us to re-envision what the future product could do for our future-customer.

Integrity of Vision

Of course to make this happen there are going to be many technical, project, and financial pressures on the project(s). There are strong forces at work to let things go too early, and other strong forces at work to make you hold onto things too long. There is a balance to be struck, but once the integrity of the vision is compromised, you can kiss the end results good bye in my book. For me, this has always been a vision of the user, or the customer, “in use”, at work, and having a sense of what they are feeling. Do they feel “in control”, do they feel “safe”, do they feel “excited”? It won’t be one thing, it will be a gestalt of many things. But someone has to hold this vision and others have to believe them, and trust them. Thus to deliver the vision, you have to build trust in all those around you. They have to be entrusted with, and hold some part of the vision.

Death by A Thousand Cuts

The insight of “simple, mobile, visual” helped guide the development journey and it was only with the help of all team members, and project sponsors, that we avoided death by a thousand cuts. Slightly crappy transition in the UI? a little bit on the slow slide refreshing? For sure you are going to have to “let some things go in order to get it out the door” and into the hands of actual users, but without a central “why”, without reference to the “insight” as to what the end user is going to experience and why this is important, it is likely that the project will stumble and die.

So What’s The Take Away Here?

We've learned lots of things on this particular journey, and I've learned a lot in my 20 or so years working with start ups and spin outs across the digital spectrum. Some of it at the higher “industry level analysis”, some at “micro-process level user experience”. If I have some fun writing this, and learn some thing from the effort of doing so, then I think you will to. So, let us go then, you and I……