Innovation can be a tricky thing. As an organization, you must respond to customer requests and remain committed to improving the brand experience. Sometimes innovation leads to a new product or service that could be a game-changer. The new product or service can start with a small client request – a one-off or a temporary Band Aid solution. It is often well received – so much so that it may ignite internal momentum to make it a more extensive offering. Or it might even be a catalyst for a change in direction. But is it?
I once had a technology firm in the business intelligence workflow space. We realized that lots of communication happened outside the established workflow process. The emails, chats, meetings, and conversations drove decisions but often sat outside the corporate-designed workflow system. It’s a problem if you are in the business intelligence technology space but aren’t capturing the intelligence outside your system. It was particularly problematic when it came to fast-paced, complex decisions like closing sales.
The client created a small prototype that could dynamically capture conversations and decisions for workflows that did not have an established process and weren’t in their installed system. The development of the prototype ignited an existential crisis. To support internal workflow, employees need a way to communicate and collaborate on what they need to do and who they need to do it with. The prototype exposed the fact that the multi-million-dollar application was not capturing the dynamic intelligence of the collaborations and discussions outside the established workflow – in chats, emails, calls, conversations, meetings, and messages. The prototype thus became a strategy dilemma. What is it that business intelligence customers need? Is it a different system that captures dynamic workflow? Is it a product to improve the existing business intelligence workflow? Was the prototype an excellent idea? Yes. One that clients would use? Well, that was not so clear.
The engineering team built a prototype, and existing customers tested it. Two common problems became evident. First, the customer interviews after they tried the prototype did not provide an explicit go/no-go direction. Second, the prototype did not include a specific use case to verify feature selection. The company was stuck in the prototype stage, with unclear features and messaging. So, we had to help the team determine what is it that they had exactly.
Download Easy to Use Related Frameworks That Work!
This is the first attempt to define a fundamental question. It will be messy, and you won’t reach a final conclusion, but we will begin to resolve what we think we are and get to what kind of customer messaging will allow us to move forward. This download is free of charge.
What Is It? Grid Template (PDF)
What Is It? Grid Template (PPT)During the “What Is It?” session, a fundamental problem emerged. The potential new product sat in the busy, confusing collaboration space. The desire to capture the dynamic workflow of internal processes that lay outside the system could be described either in terms of “transparency” or “Big Brother”. Identifying and prioritizing the features became a battle between the product development and the marketing teams. In the simple workshop, we uncovered the fact that the product itself would have to acknowledge that customers weren’t currently using the business intelligence workflow system the company sold. It was tricky to offer something so radical. It wasn’t just a new product line. It was a new direction.
During the workshop, deep conversations brought to the surface the fragility of introducing a new product that highlighted the current technology’s flaws. While the engineering team wanted to prioritize features like dynamic collaboration across the enterprise, the marketing team was more interested in features that could capture a workflow process where none had previously existed. After two years of development, this was a long overdue session, which helped them understand the new technology’s impact on the product strategy.
The grid template allowed engineering and marketing to define how they should move forward. They had to either clarify what the product needed to be to augment the existing technology or investigate the possibility that the new product could be the brand’s future. Sometimes, asking “What is it?” opens a massive can of worms. Sticking with the workshops and frameworks will allow you to make critical decisions.
The weeks of working through all the messaging strategy workshops, customer interviews, industry research, customer identification, and funding discussions culminated with a final meeting with the CEO. He asked a simple question. Could this new product be the future of his company? The answer was clear. No! The messaging workshop exercises revealed a considerable risk; it was a product that would cannibalize the existing business. And it was one that customers didn’t want because they wanted the freedom to collaborate freely in the methods that made sense for them at the time. No amount of messaging was going to create demand. Sometimes, the answer may not be what your team wanted, but it can still save your brand from disastrous distractions and get you to buckle down on precisely what your customers love about you.