How do we approach Design Strategy?
In Part 1 of this series (What exactly is Design Strategy?) we discussed how a design-driven product strategy aligns business goals with user needs. In part 2, we discuss our approach to defining a vision for a problem space to optimize our chances for success.
Concept One: Internal Drivers (the Concept Flower™)
The “business goals” side of Design Strategy isn’t just “we want to make $xxx in two years in our current business”. We see five core internal drivers of success in an innovation project. The first is priorities:
Priorities, always a fraught topic
Priorities: the leaders of any business have a vision for where they want to go, and a design/user experience innovation must be reconciled with this vision to have any chance of moving forward. Maybe the idea expands on leadership’s vision, redirects it, or is a rethink of a core idea - but the leaders must see a reflection of their thinking in the proposal to support it.
An enterprise tech campus that is never going to deliver a consumer product experience
The second is capabilities: every business has a talent base & technologies that enable the development of some things, but not everything. Again, the idea can require people to stretch or bring in outside expertise, but fundamentally they must have the capability to deliver it effectively. Remember when Microsoft tried to do digital music?
Brand alignment: this was a real product, not an AI generated image
Brand: Colgate lasagna may have been absolutely delicious, but would you have been one of the three people to buy it? Didn’t think so…
A former Design team of the founders, in full passion mode
Team: new product innovations are really difficult to pull off, many die while still in development. The idea must align with the culture & passion of your development team, as they will have to keep pushing through setbacks & dark days. If they love the idea and feel they were meant to build it, they’ll get it done.
The Concept Flower™: Sexy jobs create lovely business opportunities
Trends: finally, the idea must align with a real market opportunity, a topic we’ll dig into next.
Concept Two: Timing
Creating a brilliant product but launching it at the wrong time can result in completely missing the opportunity to create revenue and especially profit. Microsoft was brilliant at being too early (tablets, smartwatches, intelligent assistants), while the Big Three car companies excel at being too late (electric cars as the most recent example). So, how do we know when to start & when to launch?
Rogers innovation adoption curve
We all know about how societies adopt innovation, but what does this mean for a product development strategy? Well, most of the profit is made before the adoption inflection point:
After the inflection point, the product category becomes stable and price wars start as companies fight to gain or hold market share. But wait, what about the first mover advantage?
The above image is from the launch & growth of smartphones, but it applies to most new product categories. Most companies that launch at the onset of an innovation lose the battle. And please don’t bring up Tesla - the company was founded over 100 years after the invention of the electric car, and didn’t launch their first high-volume car until after Honda, Smart, Chevy and Nissan launched their efforts. So, when should you start?
Here’s the tricky part: to launch within the profit window, you have to start well before the market seems real. These innovation projects take longer to design, develop & launch than iterative projects. Getting the support for an innovation at this stage is really difficult, even if it’s for a multi-billion dollar opportunity. I know this firsthand - I really tried to get Samsung interested in drones (DJI is the market leader with roughly $4 billion in revenue).
With a few exceptions (radio during WWII and TV after the war), technologies used to take decades to reach mass adoption. We’re now seeing mass adoption in a few years, meaning it is getting extremely difficult to time a product launch correctly. The key takeaway: have a visionary Design Strategy, and see it through.
Credit to Horace Dediu at Asymco for data and insights used to develop these ideas
