What will good innovation ultimately look like and how to stay innovative while not building a solution looking for a problem.
It is the intersection between customer-centered design and design-driven innovation. Let me expand. PS: There is an method described at the end of this article if you are interested in applying this to your product strategy.
We all know about customer-centered design, so I will touch on that later. Design-driven innovation on the contrary is not as well understood. There is a book called Design-Driven Innovation published by Harvard Business School which will give you all the info if you are interested. As a quick summary: your customers don’t actually know what they need/want. Many of the breakthrough products that are available today were not envisioned by customers all around the world before they were created. So it takes a creative mind with just enough customer understanding to draw up an innovative product.
Example — the apple watch. No one knew they wanted something like that, until Apple chose to go for those early adopters, and then got what seems like everyone in the world to have one on their wrists and refuse to give it up.
But lets not just design innovation through this method. Going in blind and building a product without knowing the customer is not a great idea either. That is where customer-centered innovation comes in. While most of us know what is is, it does not mean that we understand it.
We all know that we need to talk to customers, survey them, and interact with them to better understand their needs, and yet, we don’t always do it. Usually, if you can keep up with all customer feedback without documentation, you did not learn enough.
I know what you are thinking — “I’m confused! I don’t understand which method to use when building my product!”
Which is where the intersection comes in. What it takes to build a great product is :
design-driven innovation to disrupt and show that something can be done better and in a different way
AND
customer-centered design to set just enough boundaries so that the end user can benefit properly from the end product.
In conclusion, it takes a very refined process to get it right which is why we have so many product professionals nowadays.
How do I start?!
A good start to getting closer to a good intersection is to draw up 10+ solutions to your problem, then go speak to customers, find which 3+ combinations of each solution can best solve their problem, and then shave off weight to make sure you can build, iterate, test, and repeat as fast as possible. This method will allow you to incorporate customer feedback into a product that they a completely unfamiliar with.
If any of you are interested in learning exactly how this applies to you, I will be delighted to see how I can help.
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