Over the past years, I’ve learned that many organizations make the same mistake. It doesn’t matter if the are a $600M revenue-generating department within a huge, multinational conglomerate or a one-person local shop. I’ve also learned that mistakes cost time, money, and brand reputation.
What is this giant mistake? Forgetting the customer.
In large companies, R&D scientists fall in love with, well.. research and development. Technology ends up driving product development, and the consumer gets left behind. Not to be outdone by their megalithic competitors, small business owners often let their emotional attachment to a product or idea drive them to disappearance. Just because you think it’s the greatest thing since proverbial sliced bread, it doesn’t mean a single, solitary customer will pay for it.
I’ve taught many of my clients in innovation the breadth and depth of design thinking as a creativity tool. In these posts, I’ll share a few key tenets of design thinking to inspire a new generation of leaders and business owners.
What is Design Thinking?
Design thinking is a set of empathetic practices to dig into what a customer’s real needs are -explicitly stated or (typically) unarticulated. Design thinking capitalizes on rapid prototyping and iterative learning. It’s an Agile technique. Internet searches will uncover AI definitions of design thinking as a “human-centered approach to problem-solving” integrating creativity and practical strategies to understand user needs.
(Go ahead. Stop reading for a minute and query your favorite AI robot to define “design thinking”.)
Here’s a simple image I’ve used for close to a decade to explain design thinking. There are more well-known models from famous sources. But I like to keep things simple. Therefore, in simple terms, design thinking is identifying and solving a problem.
We recognize higher levels of success to implement a solution if we break down each of these two steps into mini-cycles of learning. To identify a customer problem, the small business owner must discover who has the problems and what the exact problem is. Clearly defining the problem leads to better solution ideas.
Discover
I like to use the example of planning a vacation. If I don’t know where I want to go, I cannot plan the trip. Yet asking some relevant questions can help me discover the goals of my vacation. Do I want to spend time communing with nature? Do I want to indulge in wild adventures at an amusement park? Or maybe I want to pursue learning and appreciation at an art museum?
Discovering your customers’ needs is really that easy. Ask them what roadblocks they face. Don’t forget to ask what they want to make their lives easier and what they already know about current product solutions. You’ll discover a lot of information just by listening: location, pricing, quality of products they use and that they want.
Define
Let’s borrow a tool from Agile project management to apply for entrepreneurs to help us define customer needs. Positioning statements help business leaders to clearly define what the problem is and how they will help resolve it for a specific customer group. Learn more about positioning statement in Chapter 3 of The Innovation PROCESS Book and Episode 6 in the YouTube series of the same name. A simple example of a positioning statement follows. “We work with ______ (segment) to help them get ______ (benefit).”
Pivoting from innovation management consulting to leadership coaching, my business model positioning statement is: I work with Christian business leaders to help them achieve balance in their business and spiritual lives.
Here are some more examples of positioning statements. Use the data and information you gather from the discover stage to define the customer and end-users’ real problem. Don’t forget that design thinking is iterative.
- We work with ____ (segment) to solve _____ (problem) by _______ (uniqueness).
- Unlike others, we do this __________ (differentiation).
- The only _______ (service/product) that provides _______ (benefit).
- The _____ (adjective) ______ (product/service) for ________ (segment).
Once you’ve defined a possible consumer problem, take it back to your existing and potential customers to test. The identify step in design thinking is a cycle as shown in the figure. Entrepreneurs must constantly be listening to customers (discover), finding what they like and don’t like (define).
In Part 2, we’ll discuss the solve step. Like identify, solving is iterative.
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