Author Archives: Howard Tiersky

About Howard Tiersky

Howard Tiersky is an inspiring and passionate speaker, the Founder and CEO of FROM, The Digital Transformation Agency, innovation consultant, serial entrepreneur, and the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Winning Digital Customers: The Antidote to Irrelevance. IDG named him one of the “10 Digital Transformation Influencers to Follow Today”, and Enterprise Management 360 named Howard “One of the Top 10 Digital Transformation Influencers That Will Change Your World.”

Components of a Good Digital Strategy

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Components of a Good Digital Strategy

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

If I told you I had a document in my hand that was the new digital strategy for your company, what would you expect it to contain?

A list of projects? A “mission” statement? A technology vision? A competitive market analysis? A financial forecast?

One of the problems with the label “digital strategy” is that there’s not a common understanding of what it actually means or should contain. Naturally, the needs vary by company, but what if I said I had one menu for a Chinese restaurant and one for an Italian restaurant? Of course, there would be some differences, but there would also be some similarities: both would contain a list of foods you can order and their prices.

While we know what to expect to see in a menu, what should we expect to find in a digital strategy?

We develop digital strategies for companies from media to retail to financial services, and we use a ten-chapter outline for our digital strategy documents. Starting from this point, we often customize, and I’d encourage you to do that as well. Consider this a cheat-sheet that, if it works for your organization, can form the basis for your digital strategy.

Chapter One: Our Current Situation

Describe your company’s current situation vis a vis digital. Outline the digital touchpoints that currently exist, how recently they have been “remodeled,” how you measure their performance and what feedback you receive from both customers and stakeholders. Neither exaggerate the problems nor sweep them under the rug. The idea is to present a clear, objective, and fact-based description of the current state. Ideally, cite specific stats such as conversion, ad revenue, usability testing results or other data-driven “evidence” for your position. Also, describe any obvious gaps in your digital landscape. If you have clarity on the reasons for some of the problems or gaps (technical issues, business process issues, etc.), then state these as well.

Chapter Two: The Customer and Competitive Landscape

Describe your customer segments succinctly. What is understood about their current needs? How have they changed? Ideally, cite evidence from market research. In particular, how have their channel/touchpoint preference and expectations been evolving? What does that suggest about what your brand needs to do to stay relevant? If you have data to support it, describe how the current digital ecosystem for your company impacts your customer’s perception, behavior and purchase decisions (either positively or negatively — you may have examples of both). Now take a look at competitors. Your customers are evaluating you against your competitive set; what are they offering regarding a digital experience? How does it differ from what your brand is doing? What success metrics do you have available to indicate how successful competitive efforts are? (remember not everything your competitor is doing differently is necessarily successful). Remember to look not just at your traditional large competitors, but also at smaller competitors who may not be taking a significant market share (yet) but who might be more nimble or creative. Look also at “comparative” brands. If you are a hotel, what are airlines doing? What is Uber or Amazon doing? And how are their latest innovations both creating new expectations your customers have for you and also highlighting opportunities for your industry to do something similar?

Chapter Three: Trends

Chapters One and Two describe the current state. Chapter Three is your space to forecast the future. What trends are likely to impact your customer and your industry over the next few years? I suggest focusing on a 2-3 year time horizon. In today’s fast-moving world trying to forecast farther than that is too inaccurate. What kind of trends should you focus on? Certainly focus on digital trends, such as the shift to mobile or other digital technologies that may be relevant to your industry (wearables, VR, AR, chatbots, etc.). But also focus on trends that may not be inherently digital but which may have a significant impact in your industry over the next few years. These could be growth in China, the different priorities of the millennial generation, etc.

Chapter Four: Our Assets

Nothing in the outline of the first three chapters is inherently good news or bad news — it’s just a journalistic perspective on your brand, your customers, and competitors- where they are today and where they are going. It’s not uncommon for it to be an inventory of all the ways you are behind and that can be a bit of a downer. This chapter is your opportunity to remind the reader of any untapped assets you may have that might be able to help you leap ahead. What kind of asset should you describe? Here are some ideas. Consider which apply in your situation:

  1. Your brand — How is your brand viewed by customers? Even if you are behind the curve in digital, it takes a long time to build a trusted brand. That’s worth a lot, and if you catch up, that brand may be a huge competitive weapon even against companies who seem to be ahead of you today.
  2. Your content — Perhaps you have a backlog of content that is not being fully leveraged. A new digital strategy may enable you to tap value that is currently latent.
  3. Technology — You might have some proprietary technology that, if connected to a stronger digital touchpoint, could enable you to bring capabilities to the market that would be difficult for others to match.
  4. Your people and their skills — Your organization may be uniquely good at something. Perhaps there is a way to leverage that strength. Or you may have specific individuals whose talents aren’t fully leveraged but who could make a major difference if given the opportunity to drive new digital strategies.

Your scale, financial resources, partnership relationships, network of stores, licensed IP, etc. Companies have many other assets, far too many to list here. Try to inventory everything you have to work with and consider which other assets might have a place in developing a strategy that provides sustainable competitive differentiation.

Chapter Five: The Future Customer Journey

Chapter Five is where you describe your vision of the future. You have been setting up the rationale for change in the previous four chapters; this is where you propose your solution. Describe how the customer will interact with your brand differently in the future — what changes will be made to the different touchpoints? How does their journey play out from initial introduction to your brand, through the phases of initial interest and research, through their purchase decisions, experience of your product or service, problem resolution, and future re-purchase? Describe your customer, their situation, and their priorities and tell a compelling story that rings the intuitive bell of the user that this future journey will be both far better for the customer and also lead to better business outcomes for the brand. Support the alignment with customer needs via research data where available. One format for describing the customer journey is a roadmap.

However you describe it, your strategy should align with the three key priorities of a successful digital business.

Chapter Six: Money and Business Model

If you have done a good job in Chapter Five, you now have your reader or listener (if it’s a presentation) thinking, “Sounds great, but how much is this going to cost??” Chapter Six is where you lay out three things — roughly what implementing this strategy will cost, what your projections are for financial return, and how the business model under the new strategy changes, if at all. Clarity around investment and returns is what separates digital strategies that sound good from ones that actually get done. After all, an ambitious digital strategy for a major brand is likely to be a substantial investment. Most of the time those at the CFO and CEO level making investment decisions of hat scale are not doing it because of the inherent “good” of digital, but because they expect a return that justifies the decision. You must help them see your story in the kind of financial language that they use to make all of their other decisions. Be sure to describe not only the total budget but how much you anticipate will be capital vs operating budget and what the cash flow timing looks like. You’ll want someone from your finance department to be involved in modeling this in spreadsheet form.

Chapter Seven: Technology

It’s quite likely that your new strategy will be closely tied to technology. In Chapter Seven describe the technologies that are needed. It’s not essential to describe hardcore “tech” details or reference specific software tools. Rather, the idea here is to describe the key requirements you will have of technology to achieve the strategy.

Chapter Eight: Business Process and Organization

Often a substantial digital transformation will change the way you do business. If so, then no doubt you will need to reconsider various business processes or parts of your organizational structure. Chapter Eight should describe the types of changes that may be needed.

Chapter Nine: Timeline and Challenges

In Chapter Nine, you lay out a detailed quarter by quarter plan of how you intend to proceed. In addition, be upfront about the assumptions, risks and anticipated challenges your strategy will face. It may seem like it would be better to keep quiet about possible risks, but actually, the opposite is true for two reasons. First, it adds credibility to your plan and process to show you’re realistic about the possible roadblocks and are already thinking about how to avoid them. And second, when you get funded, and your project actually does encounter challenges it won’t be a shock to your stakeholders. Most major transformations encounter a lot of twists and turns, and you need not only the initial support but the sustained support of your key stakeholders. Having a frank conversation about the things that could go wrong in advance is planting the seeds for their support when you need it in the future.

Chapter Ten: The Cost of Failure

The last chapter addresses the question of what if we don’t do it? Or what if we do it half-heartedly? Digital transformation projects inevitably involve risks. And really wouldn’t we all rather avoid risk? This last chapter is the time to describe the risks of not proceeding or not fully proceeding. How will this impact sales? How will it impact your brand? If you just delay a year or two and then proceed, how will that impact your ability to catch up to the market?

So there you are: ten chapters of your digital strategy (or at least a starting point). One final suggestion is to make the development of your strategy an inclusive process. These days an effective digital strategy touches every part of an organization, and people can be quite resistant to an outside “digital team” deciding their fate for them. Furthermore, I suggest you create an inclusive process around the finalization of your digital strategy outline before you begin the process of developing the strategy. To the point I began with, there is a risk that when you come back to your CMO or your CEO with “The Digital Strategy” they may be surprised by what is and what isn’t covered. You can use this outline as a starting discussion point to gauge their expectations and jointly agree on what the strategy actually needs to address so that the scope and structure of the strategy meets their expectations and you can focus on the substance. Good luck strategizing and as always let us know if we can be of any help!

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog

Image Credits: FreePik

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The Most Successful Innovation Approach is …

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The Most Successful Innovation Approach

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

There are three primary approaches to innovation. In our work with large brands focused on digital transformation, we have observed that the most effective of the three is also the least common. Which approach do you use?

Approach #1: The Artist

“I create for myself. I hope my customers like it.”

Georgia O’Keeffe said of art, “Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant; there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing.” And this philosophy of creating from one’s own mind and heart, of bringing to the world your unique and individual expression, is a powerful driving force for many innovators. Steve Jobs was the penultimate artist innovator. When asked what type of market research he had conducted in creating the Macintosh he replied, “Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the phone?” He also said, “Some people say, ‘Give customers what they want.’ But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, ‘If I’d have asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me they wanted a faster horse!’ People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page. Great art resonates with people–it inspires and moves them to action. This is true of Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings as well as Steve Jobs’ creations. They create from their instinct and their passion, and their work has been wildly successful commercially. However, there is a key challenge with the artist approach to innovation: Are you Steve Jobs? How many Georgia O’Keeffe’s do you have on your team? Because for every Jobs or O’Keeffe, there are thousands of others who have followed their gut to create an endless myriad of technology projects that have not resonated. For each Georgia O’Keeffe, there are vast numbers of aspiring painters following their hearts but who never achieve commercial success. Now if what O’Keeffe says is really true for you–if success does not matter if the mere expression of your idea in the real world is sufficient to satisfy you– then this may be an effective path. But if you are seeking commercial success, the reality is that only a small percentage of the personal expressions of people’s hearts will reach out to and resonate with a mass audience. So unless you are an innovator with a proven track record of doing that, or willing to take that chance, this is a highly unpredictable approach to innovation. We often see companies designing products, be they physical or digital, by getting a small team in a room with a whiteboard. Or there is an executive who has a vision he has imagined for a product that he wants his team to bring to life. This is, in fact, probably the most common method of corporate innovation, and it very often fails.

Approach #2 The Researcher

“Give people what they want. What you want is unimportant.” – Pete Waterman, record producer
Commercial success in innovation comes from creating something new that resonates with the customer– that solves a problem for the customer or empowers them in a new and exciting way, like the Post-it or Uber. So the research approach to innovation involves simply asking the customer what they want and giving it to them. The classic focus group is an example of this; however, there are several problems with this approach to innovation. First, Steve Jobs was right: Customers often don’t know what they want. They may tell you what they think they want, but in fact, their real-world behavior after a product is launched is often inconsistent with what they have told you in a focus group. There is probably no better example of this than the disastrous launch of New Coke in 1985. Prior to the launch, Coca-Cola spent $4 Million (in 1985 dollars!) on conducting over 190,000 taste tests of different formulations to find the one that customers would like best. Based on that research they changed the taste of Coke and then spent considerably more on a massive launch of New Coke, only to be followed by massive public backlash and the eventual need to restore “Classic” Coke. How could research lead us so disastrously astray? We see all the time in our own work that when customers are asked for the features, they would like to see in an app or for ideas for new products, the results are often weak. Also, when customers passionately identify innovations they would like to see, it’s common to discover that those same customers don’t actually use the innovations they requested. In fact, customers like to be artists too, and they like to share their personal vision of what a product could be. That doesn’t mean, though, that they are Steve Jobs any more than you are, and they often have poor insight into their own future behaviors. This “researcher” approach in some form is the second most common approach we see taken to innovation projects. It can be successful to some degree for incremental changes. For example, if many users of your product are clamoring for a different sorting option in a reporting application, then sure, listening to their feedback and integrating those priorities is probably a path to incremental improvement. But that is quite different from wholesale innovation. In that area, asking users what they want rarely proves to be a useful activity.

Approach #3: The Research-Ideation Cycle

The most successful approach that we see used is what we call the research-ideation cycle, an approach that blends science and art. Customer research is core to this approach. However, the goal of the customer research is not to ask customers what they want, but rather to understand their current experiences, goals, and points of pain or inefficiencies. Uber effectively understood that the moment when a customer arrives at their destination and has to wait to get out of the car to deal with paying the driver was a small point of pain, that once removed, creates a far better experience. In the research-ideation cycle, we first create a detailed picture of the different customer segments and use techniques like ethnography to truly understand how they are accomplishing the tasks we are targeting with our innovation, whether it’s vacation planning, home decorating or rebuilding a diesel engine. Once that research is complete we can access our inner artists, but not for the purpose of self-expression, but with the goal of problem solving. In fact, creativity is usually at its greatest when a problem is brought into clear focus via detailed customer research and anecdotes. Ideation cycles involve inventing a number of solutions to the customer problems identified through the initial research. Once those ideas are generated, they can be tested with customers. But unlike the New Coke research, the goal of the testing is not to ask users what they think. It’s nice to ask because it’s polite, but it’s not the primary data source. Rather, we observe users using prototypes of our ideated solutions and use that data to gauge the effectiveness of our solutions in solving the previously identified problems. Very often we have partial success in initial rounds and use the insights from the research to further ideate ways to improve the solution. Then the cycle goes back to research, and so on between ideation and research until we have a solution that appears market-worthy. Even then typically there is a small market test or beta test, with research to understand the actual usage patterns, and the iteration process continues.

“You’re not supposed to give people what they want, you’re supposed to give them what they don’t know that they want yet.” -Diana Vreeland, Editor-in-chief of Vogue
When we understand the problems and challenges users face, creative teams can invent novel solutions that the users may never have dreamed of or suggested directly.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog

Image Credits: Dall-E

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Creating More Digital Value for Customers

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Creating more value for customers is how highly successful digital companies like Uber, Amazon, Netflix, and Apple got to where they are today.

Creating More Digital Value for Customers

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

So how do you improve your customer value? Think of customer value as an equation — how much do you give me in exchange for how much I give you? There’s the “cost” side of the equation for the customer, and there’s the “benefits” side. Great customer value engineering innovates on both sides of that equation.

Cost

An important part of the “cost” is the money the consumer spends, but it is also measured in time, convenience and level of effort. If the customer has to work harder to extract the value from your offering, this is a perceived increase in cost.

Let’s take the example of Netflix. They have always been aggressive about providing access to large volumes of content for an accessible monthly charge. Their current lowest price is $6.99 per month, less than the cost of a single movie ticket. Netflix also works hard to use personalization to lower the effort it takes to find and play content on any device.

Here are four key ways to reduce the “cost” side of your value proposition. Consider which of these might apply to your offering.

1. Charge less. This is the most obvious step. The danger is that competing on price alone can be a dangerous game and take both you and your competitors into a place where it can be difficult to make money or run a sustainable business. However, we see many of the most successful companies in the digital space not necessarily “discounting” their offer but finding ways to re-engineer their entire cost model via innovative approaches that leverage this new digital world in order to offer more for less. For example, Amazon is able to undercut the prices of many brick and mortar retailers because they don’t have the cost of retail stores and because of the large scale of their operation. Google is able to offer email for free because they have devised a way to make money via advertising rather than charging for the service.

2. Change your payment model. Blockbuster rented videos on a “per video” basis. Netflix’s first innovation was not streaming or House of Cards but rather the subscription model for video “rental.” Similarly, Amazon created a major innovation with Amazon Prime when they offered subscription 2-day shipping services. But subscription is not the only way to change the game. Disaggregation is another. Apple changed the music industry by focusing on selling individual tracks of music rather than entire albums. They then applied this same approach to episodic TV episodes which were previously only available to be purchased in “full season” DVD sets.

3. Reduce the customer’s effort. Uber takes the effort out of getting around. They extremely simplified the process of ordering a car service, paying, talking to the driver about where you are headed and managing your expense records. These may be small things, but they add up. Just like we are willing to pay more for milk at 7-11 to avoid the grocery store if your offering is less effort for the user it reduces the overall “cost.”

4. Reduce unexpected costs. Look for opportunities to save a user money that they would be paying to someone else. If a user can drive less or avoid shipping costs, you have saved them money, and they may not mind giving you a little more. An old-school example, AAA sells roadside assistance but included with this subscription are discounts to most hotels and some other travel-related services. These discounts cost AAA nothing and add value to the membership.

Benefits

Now that we’ve removed some of the “cost,” how can we augment the benefits? Here are five techniques to increase the benefits side of the equation.

1. Offer more stuff. HBO recently partnered with Sesame Workshop to add over 20 seasons of Sesame Street to their on-demand offering. Dropbox continues to increase the storage they will give you for your $9.99 monthly subscription. Consider cost-effective ways to simply give the user more of what they are coming to you for.

2. Add features. Google office massively increased the value of their “PowerPoint” competitor by enabling cloud-based real-time collaboration. Consider how to expand the features your product offers to add value.

3. Increase shareability. The more people that can utilize a single purchase, the more value it has. Apple created their family plan so that apps purchased from their App store can be used by anyone in the family. Amazon created a way to “lend” a Kindle book to a friend.

4. Increase durability or longevity. Extending the realistic lifespan of your product extends the value. For example demonstrating the “future-proofing” you have included in your solution so that it will be forward-compatible with the “next generation” of technology adds value to your offer.

5. Add flexibility. If customers can use your product in different ways, apply it to more “needs” in their life, this increases the value. You may have subscribed to Dropbox to share files with clients, but Dropbox has added and promotes features also to make it a great place to sync and store your personal photos and act as a “backup” in case of hard drive failure. Apple constantly markets the diverse ways their products can be used. iPhones are also cameras, calculators, GPS devices, musical instruments, word processors, currency converters and presentation tools. Every additional way your iPhone can be used potentially replaces another product you would have to buy and adds value.

Which of these opportunities to enhance the value equation for your customer best fit your business? For those that don’t seem to “fit,” try a thought experiment for each and consider if it did fit, how would you apply it? You might discover a breakthrough that would transform your whole value proposition.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog

Image Credits: Howard Tiersky, FROM

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Is Your Organization Digital Transformation Ready?

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Is Your Organization Digital Transformation Ready?

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

Our team at FROM has worked with dozens of global brands helping advise their leaders about digital transformation. Across all that experience we’ve seen the things that cause companies to struggle to achieve successful transformation and those who set themselves up for success.

We recently assembled our most experienced consultants to distill down the ten key factors that influence a company’s achievement at driving successful digital transformation. You don’t necessarily have to be a perfect 10 in every one of these to be successful, but the more of them you score highly on, the greater your odds. The fewer, the greater the risk.

As we are wrapping up 2024, we are considering where each of our clients score in these areas and what steps we can help them take to move towards optimizing them further.

So, drum roll please; these are the ten factors that are indicators of likely success at digital transformation:

1. Leadership Prioritization: If an organization does not feel that its leader is truly behind digital transformation, getting teams aligned will be a challenge. Transformation often requires risk, and the organization needs to know that its leaders support exploring game-changing ideas.

2. Digital Vision: Success does not happen by accident. Although a vision can evolve over time, companies that succeed in major transformations always start with a clear picture of where they want to go.

3. Iterative Development Process: Many studies have shown that iterative development processes based on Agile frameworks are the methodology used by almost every single successful digital enterprise. Agile approaches get short-term releases into production so that teams can learn from customer feedback and real-world usage and then iterate the product vision based on those learnings.

This process of rapid iteration between design/development and customer usage is the cornerstone of all successful digital products.

4. Flexible Platforms: You can have the best vision and business model, but if you can’t build solutions rapidly and bring them to market, you cannot compete in a fast-changing world. Companies who are trying to innovate and be “digital” but who’s transactional and delivery/service capabilities are tied to inflexible legacy systems are innovating with a 300-pound anchor around their neck.

5. APIs and Ecosystem: Crowdsourcing, open innovation, and extended partner ecosystems are the foundation of most digital business models. Digital businesses that allow others to build on top of their platforms grow much faster than those that don’t. Salesforce, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Major League Baseball all expose massive amounts of data and functionality through publicly available APIs and have large numbers of companies and individual entrepreneurs extending and adding additional value to their offerings.

6. Customer Insight & Metrics: Success comes from driving desired customer behaviors – sales, loyalty, self-service, referrals, etc. Teams that are successful at conceiving products or marketing programs that drive desired behaviors do so because they have insight into their customers: their desires, their fears, and their unmet needs.

7. Culture of Innovation: The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas. Companies with a consistent track record of innovation don’t do it by having a few geniuses who have all the ideas. Everyone in your organization has a different perspective on the customer, your supply chain and your business process and everyone has different life experiences that may serve as points of inspiration for the next big idea. Companies that succeed at digital transformation engage the entire enterprise to generate and evaluate ideas, resulting in higher quality ideas as well as increased ownership across the organization.

8. Experimentation: The world is changing fast. What worked yesterday may not work tomorrow. Companies that are successful don’t get there by always being right; they do it by trying a lot of things, measuring results and seeing what works. Ideas more often fail than succeed, but that’s fine as long as you have a process for identifying the winners. By contrast, many companies that struggle with innovation and transformation reward success and punish failure. Teams who are driven to avoid failure are by definition is driven to avoid experimentation. No experimentation, no success.

9. Customer Data and Personalization: We live in the age of “big data.” Many of the best opportunities in the digital space come as a result of gathering detailed data about each customer and personalizing their experience based on that data. Customers who do this have decreased cost of sales and increased loyalty.

10. Readiness to Invent New Business Models around Digital: Digital isn’t just about new ways of doing things, in most cases, it up-ends existing business models and cost structures. Netflix delivers unlimited videos for $20 a month. Skype lets you talk to anyone in the world for one cent per minute or less. Companies who are overly concerned about sticking to their existing business model tend to miss the biggest opportunities they have to serve their customers in ways that compete in the digital world.

How did you score? We’d love to know and let us know if we can be of help in your efforts at successful digital transformation.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog

Image Credits: Unsplash

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Projects Don’t Go All Right or All Wrong

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Projects Don't Go All Right or All Wrong

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

What The Heck Went Right?!

Have you found yourself working on a project that’s having problems, missing deadlines, over budget and/or full of defects?

Or have you launched new products only to discover that they didn’t get the uptake you had hoped in the market?

On most such projects, at some point, someone will say “when this is all over we need to do a post-mortem” to determine what went wrong and how we avoid these kinds of problems in the future. This is certainly an important and worthwhile activity. In Agile practices, we refer to this as a “retrospective” instead of using the term “post-mortem.” We do this partly to avoid the ever so slightly negative death-related connotations of the term “post-mortem;” also because anything named in Latin tends to sound intimidating. But most importantly because we take the mindset that a retrospective should not be triggered because “there was a problem” (or death!) but rather should be part of the completion of every project (or even a phase of a project).

In fact, I recommend you don’t view the retrospective being exclusively, or even primarily about identifying “what went wrong” on a project. The first and primary focus of every retrospective is what went right. The recommended guideline is that over 75% of the time in every retrospective should be spent on what went right. Why is that?

What went right is more useful than what went wrong.

Sure, its good to understand what went wrong, but even once you’ve done that you have a lot more work to do. Just knowing what went wrong doesn’t make the next project more successful, you then need also to figure out what you will do differently to make that “wrong” thing not happen again. And then even once you have “figured that out,” the reality is you may or may not have gotten it correct. Your “fix” is not yet proven.

So, there is yet a third step to try that “fix” on another project and see if it has the desired effect. Hopefully, it does and if so, great. In fact, I heartily recommend you do take this three-step approach when looking at “what went wrong.” But, let’s contrast that with how many steps it takes to benefit from what went right. Step 1- determine what went right. Step 2- determine why that thing went right (which is usually a lot easier than finding the root cause of problems).

And once you have figured out what went right and why you just need to keep doing that thing. So it’s simpler to get future benefit from what’s right vs. what’s wrong.

Now I can hear your wheels spinning, and you may be thinking “yeah, but come on if we are already doing something right, why would we stop doing it anyway? We are already doing that thing; we aren’t going to get any “incremental value” by praising what we already know how to do! We should focus on improvements! I’d like to say, “good point,” but I can’t.

It’s a terrible point, and here is why.

This line of thinking is based on a fallacy. The fallacy is that good and beneficial practices sort of automatically perpetuate themselves. Having worked with scores of large enterprises, I have not found this to be the case. In fact, when project teams retrospect on “what went wrong,” very often the root cause of the problem was a failure to engage in practices which they have done in the past that led them to success.

There are many reasons for this – efforts to seek efficiency, change in project leadership, a desire for variation, or just old-fashioned “forgetting to do it.” That’s why it’s incredibly valuable to reinforce what went right, so we don’t forget to keep doing it, and we acknowledge the value of the practices that led to the successful outcome.

But here’s another reason to focus most of your time on “what went right.”

Talking about “what went right” makes people feel good.

Perhaps you are thinking, “Come on, this is a place of business! We don’t come here to feel good; we come here to get things done! You can feel good at home!” In reality, many studies have shown morale is a hugely important component of productivity. In one study, the Gallup organization estimated that low morale in the form of worker “disengagement” costs the US economy as much as $350 billion a year. Giving people the opportunity not just to say “good job” but really “get into” what was done right, by who and why is a huge morale booster for everybody.

And here’s one final benefit to focusing on “what’s right,” when it comes time to get to that last 25% of your retrospective where you do want to talk about “what can we do better next time,” the team is going to be a lot less defensive and a lot more open to acknowledging problems and responsibility if it’s preceded by discussion of the positive aspects of the project. Furthermore, when team members become accustomed to retrospectives being positive experiences, they are less likely to procrastinate scheduling them, less likely to find an excuse to miss them, and less likely to show up in a defensive posture. All good things.

And I’ll anticipate one final question; you may be thinking, “But what if nothing went right on the project, it was a total disaster?” Believe this; something always went right; you just aren’t seeing it. Just like something can always be improved. On super successful projects its still very valuable to consider whether there are “things that went wrong” (once you’ve thoroughly covered what went right) and even on the most messed up projects, it’s worth digging to find what went right, it might be more than you think and its working from those past aspects of success, however small, that you will build towards an even more successful future.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog

Image Credits: Unsplash

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Errors You May Be Making in Your Customer Experience

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Errors You May Be Making in Your Customer Experience

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

Maintaining a website or mobile experience with a high degree of usability is essential to maximize business outcomes, and people who are frustrated often take for granted how easy it is in the digital world to simply click over to a competitor. Even worse are cases where determined customers simply cannot figure out how to proceed to complete a transaction, or otherwise achieve their goals.

At FROM, we regularly conduct both in person and online usability tests for our clients to observe “real” users engaging with their digital experience. This gives us enormous insight into where users are encountering frustration, confusion, or other difficulties, and while we are huge believers in robust usability testing as a tool to identify and prioritize which aspects of a digital touch point should be optimized (and really, it’s not terribly time-consuming or expensive), there is a little-known trick that can start to identify many problems. While not as comprehensive as user testing, it’s generally much faster, and therefore, a great place to start!

What is that place? The server’s error logs.

While it may not sound super sexy, your error logs contain a treasure trove of data.

First, the server will typically log if a page doesn’t load properly, errors occur, or if transactions fail to complete. Naturally, usability is hampered if your customers are receiving errors because the system not functioning properly, and yet it’s amazing how often server logs don’t get looked at. And since error logs can generally be viewed by browser and device, it’s not uncommon to find that a new version of Chrome or Edge is causing errors that previously didn’t exist, so this is something that need regular attention. In addition, many systems rely on external cloud services, increasing the points of failure. By monitoring server errors, you can make sure you are aware if your site is “breaking,” a simple but often overlooked part of managing an effective digital experience.

Second, we have errors of user validation, i.e., a user enters an invalid email or phone number, tries to complete a transaction without checking the “terms and conditions” acceptance box, etc. Now, on the one hand, you might say “That’s not my fault, my site worked. It was the user made a mistake!” Bzzzzt. Wrong answer. Especially if there are a lot of these types of errors, or if the number suddenly spikes.

It’s our job to design a solution that makes it unlikely that users will make errors. If they’re frequently overlooking something, or misunderstanding what they are meant to do, it’s a sign we need to look at that screen or field and consider how to redesign it to reduce confusion. It might be as simple as rewriting the instructions or moving a button.

One nuance we like to look for is circular errors. What’s a circular error? It’s when, during a single session, a user sends the same input multiple times and receives the same error. For example, a user submits a page, and the email is determined to be invalid (a logged error.) Then the user submits again, with the same email (and maybe then a third time, again with the same email.) These types of circular errors usually mean the error messaging system in your application is flawed. Perhaps the error text appears at the top of the screen, and the field itself is below the fold, so the user may not even be seeing the error text.

The third type of error is failed search or out of stock messages. The user wants to rent a car with a pickup at 2 am but that location is closed, or the user wants the pants in a 42 waist, but you don’t have any in stock. Or, the user is searching your site for information on bed wetting, but no articles match that term. These types of errors indicate a missed opportunity to meet a customer need, and you should scour these types of messages to consider what steps can be taken to meet commonly requested unmet needs.

All of this is based on the assumption that your site’s back-end code is logging errors properly. This is a standard coding practice, but just because it’s standard doesn’t mean it can’t get omitted, or that certain errors might not have code that logs them. It’s important to check with your technical team; if your site is not logging most errors, or not logging them with sufficient detail, this code can generally be added.

Additionally, you may include logging at different levels of your system, and therefore have multiple log files. For example, the web server may have one log file, the commerce layer may have a separate log file, and your security/authentication layer may have its own log files, and that’s fine. There are great tools that can combine them together and make them easy to analyze, filter, sort, etc.

The logging I’ve been referring to is generally done on the server. However, with each new generation of digital experiences, we push more and more code (including more and more error checking) to the client. Whether it’s javascript (in the case of web pages), or Java code (in the case of mobile apps.) These types of error events can be logged as well, it just requires a separate effort or technology (but it’s well worth it!) You can use analytics packages like Google Analytics to record “events” when certain things (like error messages) happen in the interface.

A one or two-day analysis of error logs can help you focus in on specific, frequently occurring error states that were previously off your radar. Sometimes, it’s still necessary to do user testing to figure out what the deeper reason for the confusion is, but even still, it’s helpful to know where the errors are occurring, so you can focus your testing there. In other cases, it’s easy to guess what’s tripping your users up, once the errors are there to act as signposts.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog

Image Credits: Pixabay

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What Your Website Reveals About Your Brand

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What Your Website Reveals About Your Brand

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

For the past few weeks, I’ve been sitting in a lot of usability testing sessions for web and mobile sites. In particular, for two sites that we are beginning the process of re-doing for clients. I’ve noticed a consumer pattern jumping out across multiple subjects in tests for both clients. It’s something that I think its relevant to pretty much everybody working on a digital touchpoint.

Brands spend a lot of energy (and in some cases, money,) on the copy and content they put on their sites to tell you about their brand and products. But listening to all these research subjects, I hear so much cynicism about what brands say about themselves. Maybe its the impact of election season, but consumers seem to be at the point where they just assume that most of what brands say about themselves are somewhere between an exaggeration and an outright lie.

As a result, what I am hearing from these customers of our clients is that they feel they need to ‘read between the lines’ to predict what they can actually expect if they decide to move forward and do business with a brand, whether its a bank or a breakfast cereal. And how do they do that? By evaluating the quality and experience of the brand’s digital presence.

For the consumers we have studied, the experience of a brand’s site (or mobile site or app) is what you have “told” the customer the experience of your product will be. Period.

You can write copy that states your product is friendly, easy to use, and fun, but if your website is confusing and disorganized, or has errors or broken image links, THAT is the message people take away. If your signup process is cumbersome, they assume so will be your product. If your error messages are unfriendly, they assume that’s the same characteristic they can expect from your customer service.

It’s perhaps an obvious insight that the quality of your web experience reflects on your brand, but what I’m saying goes a step beyond that. Whatever the experience of your website is, that is your brand and the quality expectation you’re setting, especially for prospective customers, who don’t yet have other experiences of your products or services.

Sadly, in the case of several different tests, I sat in over this past weekend, the experience was flawed — no doubt in part why we’d been hired to re-do them. Large investments had been made in features and content. Both sites had some great attributes and were visually appealing. But when you started using them, they had small inconsistencies confusing terms, occasional bugs, and other small “broken window” type defects that, when aggregated together in a total experience, left the research subjects saying things like, “I’m not sure I’d trust my taxes to a company who makes these kinds of mistakes. I don’t want mistakes like that on my tax return,” and “Their product is pretty expensive, and my sense from this site experience is that…it’s probably not better than cheaper products out there.”

It may seem discouraging that consumers “jump to conclusions” as a result of small defects or flaws in your digital experience. But here’s two pieces of good news: First, so often these problems are not that difficult to fix! A thorough heuristic and usability analysis can often be achieved in a few weeks. So often this yields dozens of small issues that can be improved with minimal effort. Of course, deeper problems can also be uncovered, and these may be more time consuming to address, however understanding the magnitude of the issue and the business impact that its having is the first step towards solving it. And second, this connection is not all bad. Prospective customers may be cynical about what you say, but their belief in the veracity of their experience means that by delivering a first-class digital journey you can persuade them that your brand is worthy of their trust and create positive expectations of your products and services.

So how do you figure out the right answer, get everyone on the same page, and focus on a common innovation goal? At FROM, we use a specific model to approach the process of identifying the most relevant opportunity areas for innovation, and to build group consensus around the best approach. You’ll have to adapt it to your situation, but the model should provide a good starting framework.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog
Image Credits: Pixabay

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Finding Innovation in the Humble Garbage Can

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Finding Innovation in the Humble Garbage Can

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

Uber has taught us that even the most commonplace products and services are ripe with innovation. They’ve re-invented the taxi experience, and many people would agree that, given a choice, they’d never go back to the old way.
Today, I want to give a shout out to another company, one that’s doing amazing things with garbage cans: simplehuman.

Simplehuman, founded in 2000 by Frank Yang, is a great case study in terms of product innovation, as well as business model. It had one simple mission: make a better trash can. For the last year, I’ve had a simplyhuman garbage can in my kitchen, so I can attest. It is a better trash can.

Before we switched to simplehuman, this is the kind of trash can we had in the kitchen:

And this is the simplehuman can that’s in my kitchen today:

Two features of this product make it a real game-changer. The lesser of these was the rim around the top that completely hides the edges of the plastic bag that peek over the edge most cans. I didn’t realize how ugly this was until it was gone. (insert sigh of relief here)

But the real hero is the built-in garbage bag dispenser. As you can see from the image below (pulled directly from simplehuman’s website), a dispenser for new garbage bags is built right into the body of the can, saving me from having to walk across the room to get a new bag from the box under the kitchen sink when I need a replacement. Yes, this is a seemingly small inconvenience, but once it’s removed, it seems a silly waste of effort that you ever had to walk across the room in the first place.

While they may not be solving world hunger, these two improvements are enough for me to never want to go back.

Simplehuman: Our new stainless steel rectangular step can features an innovative ‘liner pocket’ that stores and dispenses liners from inside the can for a faster liner change.

But from a business perspective, here’s where it gets interesting. In order to have garbage bags that fit both the dispenser and perfectly around the rim (so that no “spillover” bag is showing,) I need to use their custom-fitted bags. These bags are sized specifically for this can and come in little boxes perfectly sized to fit the built-in dispenser.

So where does one get these magical bags? Well, when you buy the can, there’s an insert that directs you to download simplehuman’s app. In the app, you can “manage your supplies,” by ordering garbage bags or, even better, setting up a subscription, which is what I did.

What do these garbage bags cost? A 100-count box of simplehuman garbage bags is about $25. That doesn’t break the bank, but as it turns out, it’s about twice what Hefty and Glad bags cost. Besides that, the garbage can itself is about $100, compared with less than half of that for one of their less innovative competitor’s stainless steel kitchen garbage cans. Again, not outrageous, but still a substantial premium. So what’s innovation worth to simplehuman? About double. And it’s worth it to me to pay it to solve problems, even if I never realized there were problems until simplehuman’s solution brought them to my attention.

Coming up with these types of innovations for your business starts with finding painpoints. What is your customer’s equivalent of having to walk across the room to get a garbage bag from under the sink? It doesn’t have to be pain that drives them crazy. Solving just a small irritation can turn out to be a highly appreciated innovation. And what about aesthetic gaps in your products that nobody focuses on, but would be obvious once gone (the way Steve Jobs showed us how ugly PCs were by creating the iMac)?

Finding these types of unmet points of pain can be achieved through ethnography and other research techniques that create customer empathy. Techniques like these can generate profound insights with relatively minimal effort, and at FROM, we utilize them on nearly every project. The majority of the time, the most winning features of the new digital products we create come from solving problems generated by these insights. The ideas may not come from the customers (in fact, they probably won’t) but the pain insights do. Once you have those, it can open up new doors, and allow your team to come up with many new solutions.

Additionally, innovation is often not just about the product, but also the business model. Achieving simplehuman’s innovation required custom-fit garbage bags. I’d imagine that, at one point before launching this product, simplehuman realized it would be difficult to get every grocery store in America to carry these bags, especially before their product achieved critical mass. That logistical problem could have killed the whole concept. But instead of working within the existing ecosystem, where can-sellers have to align to a few non-tailored garbage bag sizes, they shifted their business model to app-based subscription. This allowed them not only to deliver the innovation, but also to double the price of their bags (probably without customers even noticing, since their bags aren’t sold side-by-side with mainstream brands), and to realize 100% of the revenue via direct sales, rather than splitting with a retailer and distributor.

So I say Bravo!, simplehuman. Great innovation, great business, and thanks for making my life a little bit better — I’m happy to pay you more for it. Now imagine what I’d be willing to pay if you could figure out how to get the can to take the full garbage bag outside!

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog
Image Credits: Pixabay

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Creating Effective Digital Teams

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Creating Effective Digital Teams

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

Creating digital products is a multi-disciplinary process, blending creativity, engineering, strategy, customer support, legal regulations and more. How to structure their teams is a major challenge faced by large enterprises and global brands undergoing a digital transformation. Specifically, they need to answer the following three questions:

  1. What’s the optimal way to organize the necessary roles and responsibilities?
  2. Which part of the organization should own each capability?
  3. How do we get everyone working together?

The optimal structure for digital teams varies across different organizations. At FROM, we use a base framework that identifies fifteen key roles or competencies that are part of creating and operating most digital properties. Those roles are divided into three conceptual teams: the Digital Business Team, the Digital Technology Team, and the Extended Business Team.

The Digital Business Team

  1. Digital Business Vision Owner: The Business Vision Owner defines the key business measures and objectives for the digital property, including target market segments and their objectives. This “visioneer” makes final decisions on product direction.
  2. Product Management: Product Management owns the product on a day-to-day basis, and liaises with other areas to make sure the digital value proposition is realized. They’re responsible for commissioning and reviewing customer research to develop and maintain the product roadmap in terms of the business vision and can prioritize the backlog of changes and improvements.
  3. Program Management: Distinct from the Product Manager, the Program Manager is responsible for owning the long-term plan to achieve the product roadmap, including budgets and resource allocations, and for maintaining the release schedule.
  4. User Interface/User Experience: UI/UX is responsible for the overall look and feel of the digital product. They develop and maintain UI standards to be used as the product is developed, are involved in user testing, and QA new releases.
  5. Content Development: Content Development creates non-campaign and non-marketing or editorial content for the site, including articles, instructions, and FAQ or helps content. Their job is to create content that’s easy to understand and consistent with the brand or voice of the product or site.

The Digital Technology Team

  1. Front End Development: Front End Development selects frameworks and defines front-end coding standards for any technologies that will be used. They’re also responsible for writing code that will execute in the browser, such as HTML, HTML5, JavaScript, and mobile code (e.g., Objective-C.) Front End Development drives requirements for back-end development teams, to ensure the full user experience can be implemented.
  2. Back End Development: Back End Development manages core enterprise systems, including inventory, financial, and CRM. They’re responsible for exposing, as web services, the capabilities that are needed for front-end development. They’re responsible for developing and enforcing standards to protect the integrity of those enterprise systems, as well as reviewing requests for and implementing new capabilities.
  3. Data: Data develops and maintains enterprise and digital specific data models, managing data, and creating and maintaining plans for data management and warehousing. They monitor the health of databases, expose services for data access, and manage data architecture.
  4. Infrastructure: Infrastructure maintains the physical hardware used for applications and data. They maintain disaster and business continuity programs and monitor the scalability and reliability of the physical infrastructure. They also monitor and proactively manage the security of the infrastructure environment.
  5. Quality Assurance: Quality Assurance creates and maintains QA standards for code in production, develops automated and manual test scripts, and executes any integration, browser, or performance testing scenarios. They also monitor site metrics to identify problems proactively. (It should be noted that, though you want dedicated QA professionals on your team, QA is everyone’s responsibility!)

The Extended Business Team

  1. Marketing: Marketing is responsible for some key digital operations. They develop offers and campaigns to drive traffic. They manage email lists and execution and manage and maintain the CRM system.
  2. Product and Pricing: Product and Pricing responsibility can vary, depending on industry and type of digital property. When appropriate, they develop, license or merchandise anything sold on the site. They set pricing and drive requirements for aligning digital features with any new products based on those product’s parameters.
  3. Operations: Operations is responsible for fulfillment of the value proposition. For commerce sites, for example, this includes picking, packing and shipping orders. For something like a digital video aggregation site, responsibilities include finding, vetting and uploading new video content.
  4. Business Development: Business Development is focused on creating partnerships that increase traffic and sales, or find new streams of revenue.
  5. Customer Support: Customer support is responsible for maintaining knowledge of digital platforms, policies, and known issues and solutions. They assist customers with problems and questions and track customer interactions to report on trends and satisfaction levels.

How these teams and the roles within them fit together varies from company to company. However, it’s good practice to review this model to see, first, if you have these key roles represented in your organization. Then, make sure to create well-defined responsibilities and processes, and finally, look at how they function together, to see if they’re organized in the most effective manner. If your Digital Business, Digital Technology, and Extended Business teams are in sync, all your projects will benefit.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog
Image Credits: Pixabay

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Creating a Seamless and Unique Customer Experience

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Creating a Seamless and Unique Customer Experience

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

Most companies recognize that creating a seamless and unique customer experience is key to success in the digital world, but that’s not always easy to do. How can you deliver the optimal digital experience to your users?

If you’ve ever been to the arctic circle, there are icebergs that are not only acres wide, but that rise hundreds of feet above sea level — truly massive objects. Yet what is perhaps even more amazing is that scientists tell us that almost 90% of a typical iceberg’s mass is underwater, and not visible to from the surface. If you are in the “iceberg business” — studying them for science or cutting through them for ships to pass — it’s quite important to understand not just the visible component, but the full scale and depth of the iceberg.

Similarly, most companies now recognize that creating a seamless, elegant and differentiated customer experience is key to success in this increasingly digital world. Defining that optimal experience is not necessarily an easy task. In fact, it can seem like a huge undertaking, and at FROM, it’s something that we spend a large portion of our time working with clients to optimize.

But we also see many companies struggling to execute on delivering their customer experience vision. There are many reasons for this, but a starting point of success is realizing that excellent customer experience is more than meets the eye. While concrete manifestation of the experience is found in the brand’s digital properties, content, and features, this is just the part of the iceberg that sticks up above the water. Beneath the waterline is three additional supporting elements that must also be effectively managed in order to achieve an excellent customer experience and the associated business outcomes.

User Experience FROM Iceberg

1. Technical Architecture

Outstanding customer experiences are supported by modern technology stacks that permit two essential capabilities:

Access From Any Touchpoint

Great customer experiences have the flexibility of touchpoint, and permit you to not only interact via web, phone, mobile, kiosk or other devices but have all actions instantly updated and available in a consistent manner. An example of what not to do: I placed an order on HomeDepot.com and immediately realized I made a mistake. I wanted to cancel it, but due to technical constraints, you can’t cancel orders on the website, only from the call center. So I called the call center, and they told me they wouldn’t be able to “see” my order (and therefore weren’t able to cancel it) for about an hour when the systems synchronize, and I should call back then. Not a great or accessible customer experience.

Flexible Frameworks

Flexible frameworks have the ability to be modified rapidly along with the changes that are being frequently deployed. The number one secret to how great customer experiences got to be great? It’s not by having a genius team that gets it right the first time; it’s through an iterative process of testing and learning. To do that, you have to be able to efficiently code, test, and iterate or kill new ideas quickly. Furthermore, the frameworks for presentation, business logic, and transaction processing need to be flexible. If user testing shows that changing the sequence of information collected from users during a checkout process might improve conversion, you need to be able to make a change like that reasonably simply. We often see companies with aging mainframe-based “back office” systems that are holding them back from being able to re-engineer their customer experience because “that’s not how the legacy system works.” No matter how much pain, companies in this situation need roadmaps to upgrade, redesign or replace these inflexible systems to permit the creative evolution of their customer experience.

2. Business Operations

Serving the digital customer effectively is not just about creating digital touchpoints, but about evolving the total experience with digital at the center. That means you will need to change the way you do business in a variety of spheres. Customers who use online chat to ask questions expect answers far faster than those who email, let alone those who send in snail mail. Digital customers opening an account at your bank don’t want to have to wait to receive a thick packet of forms in the mail that they have to sign in 17 different places. You may want to offer digital customers alternatives in “out of stock” situations (such as a direct ship) or permit them to customize their purchases in ways that weren’t previously possible. Truly optimizing for digital will probably change how you merchandise, your return policies, your customer support, customer communications, and, well, everything. It may require new roles, new processes or a re-organization of the company.

3. Business Model

One of the benefits customers see from digital is a huge improvement in the value equation. Skype has taken our long distance bill from hundreds of dollars to pennies. Spotify has given us access to practically any song ever recorded for a few dollars a month, and Netflix has done the same for movies. In many markets, Uber has halved the cost of a taxi. This is awesome for consumers, but threatening to incumbents whose business models are dependent on the pricing levels of legacy business models. Jeff Zucker, the former CEO of NBC, echoed this concern a decade ago when he bemoaned having to trade “analog dollars for digital pennies.”

Why are some companies able to offer consumers a “better deal?” Because digital can take substantial cost out of the equation, allowing more digitally centric companies to be more cost-competitive or shift to totally different business models (subscription access to huge content libraries instead of one by one DVD rental in the case of Netflix; offering the largest ground transportation fleet in the world without ever buying a single vehicle in the case of Uber; likewise eBay and Alibaba, two of the largest online stores, both of which stock no inventory.) You can have a great website and app, but if the fundamental value equation of your business is no longer competitive, you are going to struggle.

Don’t Bolt On Digital

Digital started out as a means of communication. We then had the era of eCommerce, where we “bolted on” digital alternatives to access the same inventory and offers available in our non-digital channels. But today, the winners are “digitally-transformed” companies that are offering a digital value proposition and have a technology stack that empowers them to create a great customer experience, and the business processes necessary to support and deliver on it.

It may seem like a lot. And it is. The world is changing fast, and the companies that succeed in the future will be those that make the transition. The ones that don’t will wind up on the list with companies like Kodak, Polaroid, BlockBuster, Sports Authority, Borders, Linens and Things and Circuit City. You can use this as a high-level roadmap for what you need to do to keep up with the digital transformation era. If your formula is not working yet, ask yourself which of these three areas you might not be paying enough attention to, or adapting quickly enough.

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog
Image Credits: Pexels

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