Full Product Lifecycle pt.1 —Introduction & Identifying New Initiatives
Introduction
This four-part guide is being written to serve as a framework to identify and build successful products for businesses. This framework can be used by businesses both large and small as well as both new and existing. The framework has four parts to it:
- Identifying new initiatives
- Testing the initiative quickly
- Implementing your initiative into a product — article coming soon
- Understanding when a product is finished — article coming soon
This framework utilized concepts from Design Thinking and has the expectation the business understands the value of user experience.
What is a Strategic Initiative?
A strategic initiative is a direction the company wants to go to help the business achieve some type of goal. This is usually some kind of digital or physical product intended to help increase profits for the business. An example of an initiative might be creating a new application or adding something to your already existing application.
Identifying a New Strategic Initiative
Knowing your customers is crucial in identifying a new initiative. By understanding your customers, you can identify problems they go through. The answer to these problems is where the business comes in. Figuring out a solution for your customers that best aligns with your business goals will be the selected initiative.
Who Are My Customers?
If you’re an existing business, you may have prior knowledge about your customers but what if you’re trying to expand into new markets? What if you’re a new business? You’re going to have to identify what type of people you want to target.
Let’s use Uber as a hypothetical example. We could identify a new group of people we want to understand more. Let’s say we want to get into the item delivery industry. We want to target people who have items, besides food, delivered. Because we already have Uber Eats, we’re more interested in item delivery. Now that we have a group defined, we can start gathering metrics and identify a group of people that fit the criteria so we can learn more about them.
Empathizing With Your Customers
The business should know the customer’s goals, motivations, pitfalls, influences, environment, and where they are in their current journey. This information defines why they take some of their actions and would potentially use your selected initiative. The insights needed to understand the customer can be gathered by interviewing them and observing their actions in regard to what the business is targeting.
The amount of data needed can vary but you want to get enough data that you can identify patterns from your customers and then themes of patterns. With this data, you should be able to create personas of your customers.
Example personas:
Customer Journey
Accompanying the persona should be a customer journey. These are the steps they take around the area your business wants to progress into. In our fictitious example, we see that the driver is utilizing additional applications to fill the gap in-between rides.
Example journey:
Future Vision
After having their current journey, we additionally brainstorm what the experience could be. This allows us to be innovative and help identify the problems the user undergoes in their current journey.
Example journey:
Turning Problems to Products
Now that you know your customer and their journey, identify the areas your business can make an impact. Things like “the driver switches between apps to prevent downtime in-between rides” or “the customer places an order and has to wait two days for it to arrive” are some example problems that could be turned into new initiatives. But just because there is a problem, it doesn’t mean the business should solve it. Remember, there is a goal for your business as well. Quantifiable metrics must be defined before selecting an initiative to turn into a product. Here is an example: If we can reduce the driver’s need to use multiple applications to reduce downtime, drivers will be able to complete X amount more rides per day. If an average ride is equal to $Y for the business, that will result in $Z/year. 10 more rides/day, $2 average to company/ride = $5,200 per year per driver. This is usually done by someone with business experience.
Once you’ve figured out which initiative would be lucrative for the business, it’s time to start figuring out if you’re predicted solution is actually in-line with your customers.
Research and Test
Before going into development you’ll want to get more information specifically around the initiative that's been selected. Initially, you were looking to understand the customers at a holistic view, but since you’ve honed in on a specific initiative there are more specific things to observe. “How is the customer handling this currently,” “what are some strengths and weaknesses of that competition,” and “why aren’t they using what already exists” are some initial questions to be answered that will help understand how your customer deals with the problem. This information will be used to test the concept in what is known as a “Design Sprint.”
Design Sprint
The design sprint is a 5-day exercise in which you end with a tested concept that will reveal information around whether you should proceed to development or go back to the drawing board. We’ll go into depth on this process in the next section.
Conclusion
To identify new initiatives the business must understand their customer and their journey. This information is used to pinpoint problems that would benefit the business to solve. Once a problem has been selected, additional observations should be conducted before starting a Design Sprint.
In part 2: Testing New Ideas Before Wasting Tons of Time and Money, we’ll go over what the Design Sprint is, what you’re looking to get out of it, what to do if you don’t get the outcome you want, and how to progress into implementation.
Ritzie Design Studio is constantly on the hunt for knowledge and improving the way we design products. Let us know what you think in the comments section and follow us for more discussion around process and designing products!
