The Triple Diamond
Closing the Painful Gap between the Customer and your Product Strategy
There’s a strange feeling to many, looking at methods like the double diamond and Design Thinking. You can’t help thinking that something is missing, especially if you’re building a standard product with a strategy behind. Adding a space for the strategy seems obvious.
The Problem with the Problem Space
You iteratively explore the customers problem space and find out how to solve that in the solution space. It’s easy as that -isn’t it?
It doesn’t feel good to blindly build solutions how the customers wants them. This feeling was greatly described in the book Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri. The double diamond is targeting that with first exploring the problem space and then afterwards finding a solution. So the customer does not dictate the solutions.
Your opinion although interesting is irrelevant?
Neutralizing the own opinion while talking to customers and exploring / experiencing their pains, is a good thing. There’s the quote “Your opinion although interesting is irrelevant”. Still the strange feeling stays: You neither should blindly take action for the problems the customer identifies! Because it would mean to end up implementing any topic. One day the customers want an autonomous car, the next day they need a few bugs fixed in their ERP system. In less obvious cases, you will be drawn step by step into areas and topics that do not positively influence your portfolio and success and that are outside your core competencies.
There is more to Strategic Action
What many forget is that in most cases you already have a company and/or product strategy that is derived from the whole market you experienced onto that point. This strategy ensures a sustainable company growth and takes a look on big future opportunities. Of course it makes sense to take that into custody!!! Otherwise there would be no iPhone and electric cars would still look like that:
Your Strategy is influenced by many factors. Some of them are the Market Pull (Market Topics and Trends, etc.), your own capabilities, the technological push (technological trends and possibilities) and the market opportunities you discover.
Like the separation of powers you have to think about three powers.
- The Customer insights you create (Problem Space)
- The own Strategy you develop based on your company, market topics, trends and tendencies you experience.
- The feedback of your customers!
To really be ahead of your time, to really be the innovative leader, you have to keep in mind, that your customers might not even have recognized the real problem. They might not give you the right topics you need to truly find big opportunities for a exponential growth of you, your company and your solution! So you need to think further and predict what could happen and most probably will happen: So that when the market is ready, you are ready! Not without a reason there is a complete discipline for future management. This is true for products, but also for the further development of existing products!
There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come — Victor Hugo
The Triple Diamond
So I created a triple diamond that is taking a force for Strategy into custody. There are three major values to the triple diamond:
- In the problem space it helps you identify wich of the identified problems to solve according to your strategy.
- For the strategy itself it lets you identify new opportunities and optionally extends your strategy.
- In the end the strategy is something that delivers context for the solution.
Every space and also the whole process are iterated multiple times, as often as needed to deliver the best outcome.
Described in a few words from the left to the right:
- Customer insights are something you create by discovering and exploring the customers problems. Define a problem hypothesis and discover again if it doesn’t match the stakeholders statements.
- You link to the strategy by coupling the content you describe with our experience, vision, strategy and additional influencing factors. Find out if it resonates with the factors of your strategy.
- Optionally extend the Strategy according to what you’ve learned. Do this if it makes sense based on the factors of your strategy.
- Communicate the bundled requirements and the strategic background to the solutions space.
- Develop or create a solution draft and in later iteration attempt to build a solution.
- Validate and evaluate your solution based on the customers feedback, e.g. by beta testing, communicating with pilot customers, etc.
To learn more about strategy development itself, stay tuned for future articles on that topic. Little spoiler: Often it’s not about a 100 pages strategy document, but about some core information in the right form and place.
If you like this little hack, like and follow!
