Inspired by the work of Christopher A. H. Vollmer, Matt Egol and Naseem Sayani on a new article on business-stratetry website, I create this post to summarize the infomation that I found useful for any practitioner who want to improve the digital image of their enterprises. This is rather a long article but bear with me, you will be surprised at what you can find here. Here we go.
What does it mean to become a digital leader? Companies in every industry are looking for answers to this question. They are exploring new business models, developing new user experiences, and experimenting with new channels and platforms—all with the strategic goal of creating significant value in a digitally powered business environment. To get there, most of these companies are pursuing the same laundry list of initiatives.
For too many companies, these efforts have not translated into enough market impact and growth. They are stuck. Their results are too incremental; they merely move their brand recognition or increase sales a bit. But there is far more market-making, world-changing potential for them in digital businesses, products, and experiences, and more and more business leaders know it. Instead of reengineering their digital practices and processes, they need something bolder and more disruptive, but still very simple. They need reimagination. Reimagination means reshaping your entire business around the customer or user experience. The best-known term for this is human-centered design (HCD). When companies practice HCD, they put the user (the customer, the audience member, the person on the other end of the digital channel) at the center of every decision the company makes. This empathetic focus on user experience is an essential driver to creating simple yet disruptive solutions that are operationally feasible, economically viable, and, most important, desired by users.
Human-centered design represents a new way of life for business. It cannot be easily achieved with the embedded controls and constraints of a typical mature enterprise. In the digital world, time really is money. Companies no longer have the luxury of carefully developing new products and business models via a bureaucratic and waterfall-driven stage-gate process. Instead, successful companies evoke many of the attributes of a startup—creativity, speed, bias for action, flexibility with risk, and radical collaboration. People work fluidly across functions and business units and collaborate readily with outside vendors and business partners when specialized expertise is needed. These companies are less likely to force their talent, whether internal or external, to run the gauntlet of restrictive finance, IT, legal, and HR processes. Finally, the digital process is a viable contributor to the business, with significant revenue and profit growth rates.
To achieve this entrepreneurial vigor in your company, you may have to consciously break down long-established internal barriers. One way to do this is to put human-centered design at the center of what your company does. The details will vary from one company to the next. Every company has its own distinctive situation, there are five basic principles of digital reimagination that any company can follow: Embed human-centered design in everything you do, build brand value holistically, design for three years out (but build for today), stand up new structures and teams, and nurture your existing digital culture.
1. Embed human-centered design in everything you do – a case study. Focus first on designing and delivering great user experiences by learning and applying some basic practices of HCD. For example, in online surveys with an HCD orientation, you ask questions that develop robust behavioral insights by empathizing with users’ needs, habits, and pain points. You use the answers to fuel high-impact digital value creation. You look for ways to engage with customers, and you mobilize rapidly to meet the most attractive opportunities revealed through that engagement. You also develop an agile, iterative prototype and launch process, which allows you to release-test many new products and services, starting with the “minimum viable product,” or MVP. An MVP is a product with the minimum number of features required for a holistic user solution. Your goal is not technological excellence per se, or even rapid time-to-market with a new offering, but emotional connections with your customers. In short, leveraging HCD in a holistic way from strategy through execution enables you to tap into customers’ motivations while also providing greater utility and functional benefits.
These principles become even more powerful when connected to community. Building connections to your users is just a starting point. Your real digital value emerges when people engage, share, and build community with one another. This direct engagement—facilitated by your company—creates a venue for habitually capturing insights about what customers think of your products and services, what matters most to them, and what consistently irritates or enthralls them. These insights can then feed your innovation practices across customer service, marketing, advertising, and promotions.
The musical instrument manufacturer is a compelling example of how this plays out every day. The core mission of its leadership team (including the private equity managers who had invested in the company) was to transform the brand from being product-focused (“we make the best instruments”) to being lifestyle-focused (“we serve music enthusiasts”). Anyone who uses this company’s products today is seen as both an artist and an enthusiast—not just in the rock genre, but in almost all music categories. These musicians are actively engaged in forums and content about the features and maintenance of their instruments. They share music and new sounds with their peers, and they collect instruments representative of their music heroes.
But what about those who do not currently play music? Or those who are trying to learn? The company used some basic practices of human-centered design to uncover some attributes of these potential enthusiasts that would provide a connection to their aspirations. The company gathered insights about the way these people listened to music, and the pain points they had experienced in trying to learn to play.
The company found, for example, that music was not an independent experience for these enthusiasts; they were part of an ecosystem of content, composed of a vast range of music sources. These included online stores for music downloads; traditional sources like the car radio; music-oriented social media where people exchange recommendations; subscription-based Internet radio services; music video sites; and live music. Many of the enthusiasts were also curators, interacting with other enthusiasts and with artists in a variety of forums, and buying their music in a variety of ways.
The company invested in building a unique online presence that helped simplify the process of sorting through these options, and that put enthusiasts and musicians more closely in touch with one another. That, in turn, gave them more reason to interact with the instrument maker. Reimagination, via HCD, delivered a ripe base of insights to drive forward the “lifestyle agenda”—powered by a test-and-learn mind-set that is helping the organization learn from the results every step of the way.
end of part one
credit to Christopher A. H. Vollmer, Matt Egol and Naseem Sayani.
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