Provoking startups to ask themselves very critical questions — Alexandra Agafonova, Service Design Coach, Applied Data Incubator
Startups need to be challenged and those in the first cohort of Applied Data Incubator are no different. That’s why the program in Berlin is delighted to have many expert coaches and mentors that support and question the teams — so they can grow and improve. Right amongst them is Alexandra Agafonova who we recently interviewed to discover more about their role as a Service Design Coach. In the following piece we explore the importance of having a unique value, preparing for the market, the need for desirability and more. We thank Alexandra for her time and for sharing these insights.
- Please briefly explain your role and your company.
I am an expert in the field of Service Design, currently helping large organisations as a freelance consultant to set up internal innovation design capabilities. I am also coaching hackathons, startups and teams of rather small companies in the methodology and techniques of user-centred innovation. For about five years before starting my freelance business, I co-led Service Design capability at Deloitte Digital in Germany, being involved in the design-driven innovation projects of different scale across multiple industries and markets.
2. How did you come to specialize in your field?
Holding a diploma in Service Management from Moscow I came to Germany to study integrated design at KISD in Cologne (Köln International School of Design). During my studies I could try and experiment in the different design fields such as interaction-, business-, environment- and gender design but I found service design was the most interesting discipline as it allowed me to apply my skills and talents on the full scale. Being a service designer means being a researcher, an ethnographer, an alternative thinker and initiator, an inspiring leader and energetic facilitator. Service designer combines both creative and analytical thinking. You design journeys, experiences, processes, you work a lot with abstract maps and models, you communicate with different groups of stakeholders and users. You need to be a diplomatic, open, an empathic listener, but you also need to be able to tell a story and ask the right questions. Well, I totally love it and enjoy every day what I do professionally.
Within my studies and also afterwards I was engaged in the exciting international projects where we were exploring products, contexts and cultures of Greece, Taiwan, China, Mexico and designing new services and experiences for the German market, inspired by the findings of the ethnographic research. What an amazing task!
3. What do you enjoy most about being a Service Design Coach at the Applied Data Incubator?
First of all, I love sharing knowledge and expertise to help others to achieve their goals and create value for the world. That is why my role at the Applied Data Incubator is very fulfilling. I really enjoy seeing teams digesting new frameworks, approaches and examples from my practice and realising how to play and experiment with their business idea, what could be their next step to test their assumptions. They ask smart questions and we have interesting and sometimes hot discussions.
4. How important is it for a startup to find their own unique value?
I provoke teams of the Incubator to ask themselves very critical questions: “Are we sure we are not doing something that was solved by others a long time ago?”, “Do we know our customer so well to be able to tackle the right pain points and unmet needs?”. Without answering these questions the teams risk not to survive the real market circumstances.
And of course I insist that it is very dangerous to fall in love with your idea.Around the corner the teams might find unexpected insights that may turn the idea upside down, change its core but also makes it a thousand times stronger. The value may be hidden in a very small detail that you as a business are able to solve differently.
For now teams run a pure experiment, they have an environment where they can play with their ideas and sharpen them. Now is the time to take risks, be brave, talk to people and test as much as possible.
So yes, without searching and finding a unique value proposition — a little something that helps people save time, do their job faster, easier, better — no business can survive the realities of the market competition and demands of today’s customers. Rolling out an idea based on the pure hypothesis that it might be good for people out there is more than risky.
5. How do you coach startups to be prepared for the market?
The focus of my coaching sessions lies in user research and business design. I encourage teams to run ongoing research activities using different types of research techniques to gain tangible findings from the market. We discuss collected assumptions and define best ways to test them. Our teams talk intensively to experts to gather relevant insights, they actively participate in the events where they can build partnerships and find opportunities to interview relevant market players. We also work with service blueprinting to design a plan for rolling out the new business idea. This exercise helps find the gaps in understanding the customer journey and the required back-end capabilities to be able to successfully launch the new service.
6. You have previously outlined how important it is for startups to have desirability, can you share more on why this is?
This is very simple — people do not care about goals and KPIs organisations set themselves when they develop a service. They have tasks they have to accomplish, problems they need to solve and individual challenges that they cope with. If there comes a service that can ease these processes, offer support and make it less stressful, customers will give it a chance. If this trial turns out to cost even more effort — long waiting times for registration, no adequate and fast customer service or offers that require a lot of customer interactions than the value they actually provide — the customer will not stick to the service for a long time unless this is the only option. As soon as another player will empathise with the customer’s painful experience on this journey and will offer a better solution, the customer will easily recognise the value and change provider.
7. If you were hosting a dinner party, who would be your dream guests and why?
I think these would be my favourite female contemporary artists Donna Huanca, Katharina Olschbaur, Masha Reva and Loie Holowell. I would set a table somewhere on the terrace of a house by the sea on a Greek island, on a hot summer night, with candles, house wine and beautiful music. This dinner would be about celebrating life, love, talent, freedom of expression and freedom to choose our own path, and the beauty of being a human who hasn’t lost connection to her heart and serves life from the point of pleasure. If all we do is serve ourselves and the others with love, compassion and empathy, we can thrive in a better world, full of happier relationships and successful businesses.
