The Great Disruptors
Companies employing process automation are on the right track. I mean think about it, with process automation often times an ROI can more quickly be realized than other types of investments. This is a result of less errors, less human intervention and oh yeah, less headcount. But if you’re depending on transactional based investments to knock out the competition, you’ll quickly realize it’ll simply get you
to the next round.
Is it any wonder that competition is springing up faster than ever in every industry. The term “disruptor” is no longer limited to the 6th grade class clown that makes a habit of visiting the principal’s office. With the abundance of web based services and ease of subscription services, it’s no wonder that software companies are racing to add features and ramp up the richness of a customer experience.
In this race to amp up product features in hopes of extending customer usage and the product life, we see the widening gap in the trajectory of customer utilization. It’s in this widening gap that the infamous “disruptors” creep around waiting to exploit a unique set of capabilities that carves out a small niche of customers with sniper like accuracy. This trend leads to further fragmentation of products and plug-ins. I must hand it to these disruptors, because they can quickly become masters of their craft and have a primal like instinct for seeing through the eyes of a customer.
When you dive further into product strategy and traditional methods for how a product is innovated, you’ll come across activities like gathering the “voice of the customer” (VOC) and “researching the competitive environment”. Within VOC it requires you to gain feedback, insights and ideas from your customers (or potential customers) by asking intelligent questions that lead to product enhancements,
new products, or new services attached to a product. When researching competition, it’s common to examine their messaging, product pricing, features, methods used for selling, delivery channels and market share.
Now, I’m not going to knock these methods, as I’ve used them as a part of my own product
management and they definitely carry value. However, I believe it was Steve Jobs that was quoted saying “Customers don’t know what they want, you have to tell them what they want”. In my experience, there is truth to that statement. Not that you’d take that so literally as to force-feed a set of product features down a customer’s throat of which they have no use for. But this is where our customers look to us for helping them see what is possible. It’s grave error to expect customers to know what is the latest in tech innovations that can empower their business.
So the question is, how do we develop our own creative muscles that flex on our competition and break out new innovative value for customers? This is where I recommend employing methods of “design thinking”. For those new to this method the folks at Ideou.com have outlined 4 phases to simplify the approach. If you’d like to jump in and see how design thinking can translate into a concise roadmap for product innovation, this is where we come into play and Make It grow!
Matt