5 tips for creating market leading products
CobaltNiche Newsflash newsletter, 25th November 2014
by Brett Capron
Design Thinking creates innovative, market leading and unique products that truly engage users, here are 5 simple tips to assist in launching market leading products in your business.
1. Don’t compete. Lead
Rather than mimicking the product offering of your competitors, or competing on price — lead your business to innovative market leadership. Often businesses are so intensely focused on matching or outperforming their direct competitors, they fall into the trap of conservative benchmarking and “me too” products that are evolutionary rather than revolutionary. In order to create innovative products, businesses need to engage with end users, with open minds, seeking to understand user behaviour and unmet user needs.
Design Thinking offers a fresh approach to revolutionary (disruptive) or nuanced product development that creates value for businesses, unique product offerings and competitive advantage.
2. Observe users and look at extremes
When looking for insights into user behaviour and needs we don’t simply ask users direct questions, this approach leads to little, in the way of new discoveries. Design Thinking research seeks to better empathise with users by observing their behaviour in context, in addition to asking questions.
Design Thinking focuses analysis on the behaviour of extreme users who will likely display behaviours and express opinions that are shared by many, but remain unspoken and not displayed by the majority. Then by mapping what people say against what people do, we can look for patterns and anomalies to identify user insights and latent, unmet user needs.
3. Think divergently
Armed with a suite of user insights, a Design Thinking approach then goes on to creatively and divergently generate many solutions within a constrained time frame. Traditionally, analytical business thinking uses a convergent approach. Selecting from the available options and knowledge base to determine the most effective solution.
Divergent thinking creates new options and solutions through a series of creative thinking and ‘intensive workshop’ techniques. This provides a broader range of initial ideas, from which products and solutions can be developed through iterative design, prototyping and testing.
4. Embrace the possibility of failure
The fear of failure is a crippling attributes of the human condition. Stepping into the unknown and being unsuccessful in a business context, can risk an individual’s professional reputation or raise questions of competence. This is played out in businesses across Australia that focus on low risk new product developments, rather than taking a risk and seeking truly innovative solutions.
Design Thinking addresses this fear by prototyping early and often. Rapidly constructing low-cost, functional mock-ups and prototypes, and then testing these allows designers to gain fast and direct feedback from users. This feedback can be fed into further rapid prototype iterations of increasing resolution, all the while gaining more understanding of user needs and product feasibility, ultimately mitigating the risk of developing innovative new products.
5. Get professional help
Product Designers (like the team at CobaltNiche) are professional Design Thinkers. While you can access a lot of literature regarding Design Thinking, there is no single step-by-step approach that will work in every circumstance.
CobaltNiche design and develop Design Thinking programs to suit the particular clients, industries and challenges presented. After designing the program, our intimate knowledge of Design Thinking enables us to sense the optimum time to iteratively transition between research, divergent thinking, prototyping, and refinement — arriving at a feasible solution in the most efficient manner.