product

Business outcomes vs customer outcomes

My parents grow a bunch of fruits and vegetables at home. Their little garden produces about 1000 oranges, all at the same time. So my mum calls around to see if any of her family and friends will take some off her hands. My parents would make trips to all their friends' places with boxes of oranges. We can never get through our box. Sometimes, we secretly throw some away. I feel bad about it.

My parents love growing their own produce and cooking with it. Gardening is something they do as a hobby. They like the communal aspect too. There is often produce-exchange happening amongst their friends, all growing different things at home.

Let’s think of my parents' oranges as a business. They are producing something of value that others want. In most cases, people pay them back with their own produce, hospitality or heart-felt thank yous’, instead of money. However, they have an oversupply problem. Their “business outcome” (or goal) has become to distribute as much of their produce as possible before it goes bad. This, however, is not an outcome I am interested in. In fact, being involved in it makes me feel bad.

Most businesses have the same problem. They come up with some goal to hit… “move 1 million units this quarter” or “decrease customer support calls by 5%”. Customers don’t care about these one bit.

I do love oranges from my parents. I want them, just not 100 at the same time. Therefore, the “customer outcome” I have is “to be fed tasty oranges on a hot summer day”.

How do we further business outcomes and customer outcomes together?

This is where we have to do some market analysis. Understand our customers better and solve problems they have. There are many ways to do that. “Jobs to be done” by Clayton Christensen comes to mind (the story about McDonald’s Milkshake sales). Better insights we have of customers, more confident we can be about opportunities we identify. These opportunities should “kill two birds with one stone”. They will solve a problem for a customer, leading to the business outcomes being met.

In my parents' case, the opportunities identified should help them distribute excess produce. They could…

  • Sell it at a local market

  • Sell it to the local fruit shop

  • Put it in a box and leave it by the footpath for anyone to take

  • Throw excess away

  • Make orange juice and distribute that instead

Number of these are good ideas. How do we narrow the field? I’m going to stretch this example further and talk about “product vision”. Usually, there are many entities solving the same problem. Whether it is selling fast food or travel accommodation, many companies are trying to fill the same core need. To carve out a piece of the market, it is important to have a vision that speaks to a company’s identity. Customers can align themselves to this identity a lot better. It will also produce an opinionated product, this is differentiated in the market. As an example, many smartphones… perhaps only one company is thinking privacy first.

For my parents, gardening is a fun activity. They don’t care about making money from it. They do enjoy the communal aspect of it. Given all opportunities, making orange juice fitted them the most. More people like juice; it is convenient, easy to store, transport and drink. They repurposed empty glass bottles to store juice and distribute them around instead. I am a big fan of these compared to cutting up oranges one at a time.

Both business and customer outcomes met.

A litmus test for strategy

Recently, I was questioning why I felt uneasy about some strategy talks I’ve been having with my peers. While something felt off, I was unable to articulate the why. Things didn’t come together till my friend, Scott Horn, threw in this great heuristic. It is a wonderful litmus test if you are thinking strategically about your approach.

If the opposite of your strategy doesn’t exist, it is not strategy at all.

Imagine we made a Music app with the highlight feature being “Playlists”. In order to compete with many dozens of music apps out there, You start looking around. We have…

  • Pandora making intelligent playlists out of music attributes
  • Google making playlists out of gathered data
  • Spotify allowing customers to share playlists with each other

Perhaps, our playlist solution needs to be “curated by experts”?

If our competitors are already doing this well, then it wouldn't be a great approach. It would not grant us any competitive advantage.

If a strategy is what all competitors are already executing on, then it wouldn't mean much. It would be “business as usual”. It wouldn't help the product grow as much.


Update: Having done more reading, this is possibly where these words of wisdom originated from: https://www.bridgespan.org/insights/library/strategy-development/roger-martins-unconventional-wisdom#.VRW6sZOsUYc

Wonderful read with far better examples!

Why Design is Important

A lot of the time, design is a step that is left up to the developer working on a feature. He/she is given full liberty to make a decision on the user interface. Often, there is not enough to make an informed decision on the UI, even though he may be capable of coming up with something aesthetically pleasing. Spending time on design can feel like a waste of time, effort and ultimately, money. This is, of course, not true.

Design is where marketing, sales and brand meet the product and its platform. It is the round table where all departments can sit down to have an equal say on how a product’s development effort can be be part of the bigger story.

A designer can interpret some of the abstract thinking behind features to produce a consistent design, which in turn can be interpreted by the technical team. A designer’s job is a lot more complex the just coming up with a fancy UI. He has to worry about the narrative, and ensure that the UI reflects on the spirit of the product.

Event a tiny feature like a word count in your word processor product can be a complex decision. You could

  • Have a count in the status bar of the app
  • Hide the operation in the tools menu
  • Toolbar item
  • Context menu when text is selected

The right decision can depend on a number of factors like user stories, target audience, client requests, estimated frequency of usage, new target markets etc. If you look closely, Google Docs chooses to hide it in a menu while Word has it in the status. Reflects well on what each product tries to achieve.

At the end of the day, UI is how your user forms a long term relationship with your product. The message you carry is important for this relationship to grow. A solid design process can go a long way.