Recently, my workplace moved into much nicer digs. As part of the process, architects and contractors were engaged to reconfigure the space to meet the company’s needs to accommodate future growth. Yesterday, it was time to settle up with the contractors.
As is always the case even when things go well, there were some differences of opinion on whether or not certain items were in scope or out of scope. As I listened to our discussion, it was a stark reminder of how easy it is for people to hear the same conversations in different ways and thus come away with very different expectations.
That reminder was particularly timely. Today, in about four hours from now, I will be presenting a product roadmap to our Board of Directors. Clearly, this represents yet another opportunity to create either good alignment of expectations or plant the seeds of disappointment based on miscast expectation. This is because the parties to these discussions rarely have the same mental models and frames of reference when they sit to meet.
Hopefully, I will avoid a misstep by beginning my presentation with a discussion of the themes and critical success factors that are the anchor points behind the design thinking that went into the creation of the product roadmap. In other words, the discussion I am framing is not around product features, but around design intent and strategic response.
This issue of communicating intent seems to have become a theme in a lot of venues recently. I was asked to review a presentation by a colleague. The presentation was a terrific compendium of example of different classes of specific innovation tasks in which designers, engineers, and product strategists engage, and it was supported by case studies of each class of task. I was impressed by the thought that had been given to the topics. There was only one problem. The presentation was going to be delivered to two audiences: one highly technical, the other non-technical. The presentation was doomed to fail because it did not address the wide gulf in the reference points of the audiences.
This type of communication challenge is very common in organizations, and the problem grows as knowledge workers continue to become more specialized in there focus. This is why communication around design intent is increasingly important. In a recent web-cast, Joe Barkai of Manufacturing Insights raised the issue quite pointedly. Joe stated that traditional search engines were not up to the task of serving the needs of knowledge workers. He explained that today’s workers need semantic, design intent based search technology.
This is a message I see reinforced in the companies that I talk to. They are increasing challenged to leverage their information assets in a meaningful way. They don’t have the ability to get the right information into the hands of the right people so that they can make the right decisions the first time. What are these companies doing to address this problem? They are increasingly using design intent modeling tools to capture and communicate this knowledge and using semantic technology to provide high precision navigation and concept retrieval capabilities to their innovation workers.
What trends are you seeing along this vein?
You Can’t Teach an Old Dog New Tricks – Or Can You?
Product strategists are always tasked with the finding new market opportunity. These opportunities can take many forms. One type of opportunity that can be very elusive is finding an entirely new use for an existing product. It’s elusive because the product strategist is often stuck in their way of thinking about the current product and doesn’t have the perspective to see the product through a new lens. At the same time, this type of opportunity can be very attractive as it can leverage existing assets very efficiently.
Often the discovery of these opportunities is customer lead. Consider the example of Wiihab. This phenomenon finds interactive computer gaming systems being used as medical devices. Patients benefit from the exercise of motion that comes from using the Wii device and are encouraged to perform the exercise because it is fun. The CNN segment below illustrates this.
The Wiihab micro-trend represents a new market opportunity. How will the players in the space choose to develop the opportunity? Are there segment specific capabilities or complementary offerings that will create new value? It will be interesting to watch what happens here.
For innovation practitioners, it is interesting to ask if this opportunity could have been predicted. I believe the answer to this question is yes. This could have been predicted through the technique of functional opportunity mapping.
The method is really very simple. First, develop a clear view of the functional properties of your product—not just the main intended function, but all the functions of interaction in the system represented by the product, the user, and the environment in which the product is used. Next, develop functional opportunity maps of prospective use audiences. This step requires some skill at identifying and segmenting audience groups. Finally, look for high synergy intersections between your product’s function properties and those of the various prospective audiences. Those audiences with which you find a high degree of functional synergy are the ones where you can now focus on developing the usage scenarios that define the opportunity.
What other examples of new uses for an existing product can you think of, and do you think it could have been anticipated?
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