Day 29 — Creativity series 5/7: “Disruptive Question”
Years ago I got a copy of Beyond the Obvious by Phil McKinney. It’s a book about generating exciting ideas to gain competitive edge by asking important questions. From a product & strategy standpoint the new ideas, innovative solutions can be discovered through different market/technology angles. I borrow some of the ideas from the book, combining with the Lean Startup and Lean UX concept, and created a “Disruptive Question” system in order to suit the needs of product design in the digital world. Here is how it works:
Disruptive Questions: Who, What, and How
These important questions help product team rethink the battlefield and therefore generate new perspectives. The idea is to mix in different future timeline and various emerging technology, so that your vision is ahead of the market competition. By doing so, there’s unlimited possibilities and potential solutions. Here’s some example questions:
Who
Thinking about how technology changed our lives: social network, streaming music/video, instant messaging, digital payment, etc. In 5 years, what are the customer segment will emerge or disappear? How does that impact our product/ service portfolio?
What
Imagine AI and Robotics become mature technology, people use VR/AR everyday, and agentive technology (e.g. Siri) becomes a necessity. What are the things people will start/stop doing? How does that impact our offering?
How
If I have the combine power of Amazon, Facebook, and Apple, what would I offer differently compared to my existing value proposition? With that level of resource, what are the things we should stop doing?
Idea Ranking
Using the example questions above, we can paint a very colorful future vision like a realistic Sci-Fi movie. However, in order to tide back in to our business problem statement, the crucial step is to examine these ideas and rank them by evaluating the level of impact on our competitive landscape and intended user experience. Here’s some useful criteria:
Scale of UX impact
Rank all the ideas of user experience (UX) impact on a scale of 1–5. If you want to be more specific, you can have multiple UX scales. For example, desirability, usability, usefulness.
Scale of market impact
Rank all the ideas of market impact on a scale of 1–5. You can also have multiple market impact scale. For example, purchase intention (PI), brand awareness, and cost/performance ratio (CP).
Implementation Planning
Once you put your ideas and examine with criteria that suits your business/industry, you can have a better understanding these ideas’ product/market fit, and determine who’s the front runner of these innovative ideas. It’s great that you have these futuristic ideas, but it’s also important to think about the technical feasibility aspect. You can use Kano Model to help think through what are the quick wins you want to score, and what’s the longer term vision you’d like to achieve.
ABC. Always be clappin’.
