Category Archives: Digital Transformation

Creating More Digital Value for Customers

1 Reply

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

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Humanizing Agility

1 Reply

Humanizing Agility

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

Like many others, I invested time in isolation during the pandemic to engage in various online learning programs. As a highly credentialed coach to many global Agile and SCRUM leaders in major international and local organizations, I enrolled in an Agile coach certification program and enthusiastically attended all daily sessions. It was a disastrous learning experience, verifying my perception of the Agile community’s focus on a prescriptive rules-driven process to agility. The Agile Manifesto’s  highest priority is satisfying customers through the early and continuous delivery of valuable software; only two of the 12 principles mention people – “Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project” and “the best architectures, requirements, and design emerge from self-organizing teams.” So, with this in mind, what might be some of the benefits of integrating a technological and process-driven disciplined approach towards humanizing agility?

I am a conceptual and analytical thinker, an entrepreneur, and an innovator who is acknowledged as a global thought leader on the people side of innovation. I also teach, mentor, and coach people to be imaginative, inquisitive, and curious, always asking many open questions. I empower, enable, and equip them to become change-agile, cognitively, and emotionally agile and develop their innovation agility. The presenters responded to my method of inquiry by assuming that I knew nothing about Agile despite knowing nothing about my background.

As a result, they failed to certify me without communicating or consulting with me directly, despite my meeting all of the course evaluation criteria and having more than 10,000 hours of facilitation and more than 1,000 hours of coaching experience on the people side of change. I also have a comprehensive background in humanizing total quality management, continuous improvement, and start-up methodologies in major organizations.

I contacted the training company and challenged their decision, only not to be “heard” and be paid lip service when confronted by a rigid, linear, conventional, disconnected approach to agility and its true role and capability in catalysing change, innovation and teaming.

This is especially true considering the senior SCRUM and Agile leaders I was coaching at the time experienced very few problems with Agile’s disciplined process and technological side. They specifically requested coaching support to develop strategies to resolve their monumental challenges and complex issues involving “getting people to work together daily” and operating as “self-organizing teams.” How do they go about humanizing agility?

Making sense of agility

Despite my disappointment, I bravely continued researching how to make sense of agility and link and integrate it with the people side of change, innovation, and teams. I intended to enable leaders to execute agile transformation initiatives successfully by combining a human-centered approach to agile software development through humanizing agility.  

Agility refers to a leader, team, or organization’s ability to make timely, effective, and sustained changes that maintain superior performance. According to Pamela Myer’s book “The Agility Shift”, – an agility shift is the intentional development of the competence, capacity and confidence to learn, adapt and innovate in changing contexts for sustainable success. We have incorporated this approach into our innovation learning and coaching curriculum at ImagineNation™ and iterated and pivoted it over the past 12 years in empowering, enabling and equipping people to become “agility shifters” by humanizing agility.

Humanizing agility differently

Agility can be humanized and expanded to include change, cognitive, innovation, and organizational agility, all powerfully fueled by people’s emotional energy. This is fundamental to achieving success through non-growth or growth strategies and delivering equitable and sustainable outcomes that will make the world a better place for all humanity.  

It involves identifying pivots, unlearning, learning, and relearning, embracing new approaches, frameworks, and tools, and developing new 21st-century mindsets, behaviors, and skills.

Humanizing agility involves empowering, enabling, and equipping people to be, think and act differently autonomously and competently, especially in the conflicted, chaotic, unstable post-COVID world of emerging unknowns.

Like innovation, agility is contextual.

Humanizing agility supports people to adapt, grow and thrive, become nimble by enabling:

  • Teams to deliver product releases as shorter sprints to collect customer feedback to iterate and pivot product development.
  • Leaders, teams, and organizations respond quickly and adapt to market changes, internally and externally.
  • People must think and feel and be able to quickly make intentional shifts to be effective, creative, inventive, and innovative in changing contexts.

That empowers, enables and equips people with the mindsets, behaviors, and skills to adapt, grow, and thrive by developing their confidence, capacity, and competence to catalyze and mobilize their power to move quickly and easily, think creatively and critically to make faster decisions and solve complex problems with less effort.  

Humanizing Agility – The Five Elements

1. Emotional energy

Emotional energy is the catalyst that fuels creativity, invention, and innovation.

Understanding and harnessing this energy inspires and motivates individuals to explore and embrace creative thinking strategies in partnership with AI.

Emotional energy catalyses people’s intrinsic motivation, conviction, hope, positivity, and optimism to approach their world purposefully, meaningfully, and differently.

When people are true to their calling, they make extra efforts and are healthier, which positively impacts their well-being and improves their resilience.

2. Change agility

Change agility is the ability to anticipate, respond, be receptive, and adapt to constant and accelerating change in an uncertain, unstable, conflicted world.

It involves developing a new perspective of change as a continuous, iterative, and learning process that has to be embedded in every action and interaction, not a separate standalone process.

Requiring the development of new mental models, states, traits, mindsets, behaviors, and skills to drive business and workforce outcomes that are critical for an organization to survive and thrive through any change.

Change becomes an ongoing opportunity, not a threat or liability, and humanizing agility in the context of change agility is a core 21st-century competency for leaders, teams and coaches.

3.Cognitive agility

Cognitive agility is the extent to which people can adapt and shift their perspectives and thought processes when doing so leads to more positive outcomes. 

Cognitive agility refers to how flexible and adaptive people can be with their thoughts in the face of change, uncertain circumstances, and random and unexpected events and situations. Being cognitively agile helps people break down their neuro-rigidity and eliminate any core fixed mindsets; it supports their neuro-plasticity and develops a growth mindset and ability to perceive the world through multiple lenses and differing perspectives.

Humanizing agility in the context of cognitive agility enables people to make sense of and understand the range of challenges, problems, and paradoxes at the deeper systemic and surface levels, preparing them for smart risk-taking, effective decision-making, and intelligent problem-solving. 

4.Innovation agility

Innovation agility is the extent to which people develop the courage, compassion and creativity to safely deep-dive into and dance with cognitive dissonance—to passionately, purposefully, and apply creative tension and develop neuro-elasticity, to play in the space where possibility lives—between the present state and the desired creative, inventive, and innovative outcome.

To empower, engage, and enable people to use their human ingenuity and harness their collective intelligence to be innovative in the age of AI by adapting and growing in ways that add value to the quality of people’s lives, which is appreciated and cherished.

5.Organizational and leadership agility

Organizational agility involves developing an ability to renew itself, adapt, innovate, change quickly, and succeed in a rapidly changing, uncertain and unstable operating environment. It requires a paradoxical balance of two things: a dynamic capability, the ability to move fast—speed, nimbleness, responsiveness and stability, and a stable foundation—a platform of things that don’t change to provide a rigorous and disciplined pillar.

Organizations and leaders prioritizing humanizing agility also prioritize differing and creative ways of being, thinking and acting. They maintain their strength by focusing on their core competencies while regularly stretching themselves for maximum flexibility, adaptiveness and resilience.

Finally…. Imagine humanizing agility

Imagine what you could do and the difference we could make to people, customers, organizations, communities and the world by humanizing agility in ways that embrace and embody the five elements of agility to harness the human ingenuity and people’s collective intelligence guide vertical, horizontal and transformational changes the world and humanity need right now.

Please find out more about our work at ImagineNation™.

Please find out about our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack. It is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalized innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over 9-weeks. It can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning program.

Image Credit: Pexels

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Is Your Organization Digital Transformation Ready?

Leave a reply

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

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.






Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of September 2024

Leave a reply

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of September 2024Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are September’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. Three Reasons Nobody Cares About Your Ideas — by Greg Satell
  2. Six Key Habits of Great Leaders — by David Burkus
  3. Are You Leading in the Wrong Zone? — by Geoffrey A. Moore
  4. Projects Don’t Go All Right or All Wrong — by Howard Tiersky
  5. How to Cultivate Respect as a Leader — by David Burkus
  6. What is Your Mindset? Fixed, Growth or Hybrid? — by Stefan Lindegaard
  7. Embracing Failure is a Catalyst for Learning and Innovation — by Stefan Lindegaard
  8. ISO Innovation Standards — by Robyn Bolton
  9. The Hidden Cost of Waiting — by Mike Shipulski
  10. AI Requires Conversational Intelligence — by Greg Satell

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in August that continue to resonate with people:

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

SPECIAL BONUS – THREE DAYS ONLY: From now until 11:59PM ET you can get either the eBook or the hardcover version of the SECOND EDITION of my latest bestselling book Charting Change for 50% OFF using code FLSH50. This deal won’t last long, so grab your copy while supplies last!

Accelerate your change and transformation success

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last four years:

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.






Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of August 2024

Leave a reply

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of August 2024Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are August’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. SpaceX is a Masterclass in Innovation Simplification — by Pete Foley
  2. Secrets to Overcoming Resistance to Change — by David Burkus
  3. Five Things Most Managers Don’t Know About Innovation — by Greg Satell
  4. Are We Doing Social Innovation Wrong? — by Geoffrey A. Moore
  5. Only One Type of Innovation Will Win the Future — by Greg Satell
  6. What Your Website Reveals About Your Brand — by Howard Tiersky
  7. The Coming Leadership Confidence Crisis — by Robyn Bolton
  8. Adjacent Innovation is the Key to Growth and Risk — by Robyn Bolton
  9. Bringing Emotional Energy and Creative Thinking to AI — by Janet Sernack
  10. Delivering Customer Value is the Key to Success — by Mike Shipulski

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in July that continue to resonate with people:

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last four years:

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.






What We Have Learned About Digital Transformation Thus Far

Leave a reply

What We Have Learned About Digital Transformation Thus Far

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

We are well into our first decade of digital transformation, with both the successes and the scars to show for it, and we can see there is a long way to go. Realistically, there is probably never a finish line, so I think it is time for us to pause and take stock of what we have learned, and how best we can proceed from here. Here are three lessons to take to heart.

Lesson 1: There are three distinct levels of transformation, and operating model transformation is the one that deserves the most attention.

The least disruptive transformation is to the infrastructure model. This should be managed within the Productivity Zone, where to be fair, the disruption will be considerable, but it should not require much in the way of behavior change from the rest of the enterprise. Moving from data centers to cloud computing is a good example, as are enabling mobile applications and remote work centers. The goal here is to make employees more efficient while lowering total cost of IT ownership. These transformations are well underway, and there is little confusion about what next steps to take.

By contrast, the most disruptive transformation is to the business model. Here a company may be monetizing information derived from its operating model, as the SABRE system did for American Airlines, or overlaying a digital service on top of its core offering, as the automotive makers are seeking to do with in-car entertainment. The challenge here is that the economics of the new model have little in common with the core model, which creates repercussions both with internal systems and external ecosystem relationships. Few of these transformations to date can be said to be truly successful, and my view is they are more the exception than the rule.

The place where digital transformation is having its biggest impact is on the operating model. Virtually every sector of the economy is re-engineering its customer-facing processes to take advantage of ubiquitous mobile devices interacting with applications hosted in the cloud. These are making material changes to everyday interactions with customers and partners in the Performance Zone, where the priority is to improve effectiveness first, efficiency second. The challenge is to secure rapid, consistent, widespread adoption of the new systems from every employee who touches them. More than any other factor, this is the one that separates the winners from the losers in the digital transformation game.

Lesson 2: Re-engineer operating models from the outside in, not the inside out.

A major challenge that digital transformation at the operating model level must overcome is the inertial resistance of the existing operating model, especially where it is embedded in human behaviors. Simply put, people don’t like change. (Well, actually, they all want other people to change, just not themselves.) When we take the approach of internal improvement, things go way too slowly and eventually lose momentum altogether.

The winning approach is to focus on an external forcing function. For competition cultures, the battle cry should be, this new operating model poses an existential threat to our future. Our competitors are eating our lunch. We need to change, and we need to do it now! For collaboration cultures, the call to action should be, we are letting our customers down because we are too hard to do business with. They love our offers, but if we don’t modernize our operating model, they are going to take their business elsewhere. Besides, with this new digital model, we can make our offers even more effective. Let’s get going!

This is where design thinking comes in. Forget the sticky notes and lose the digital whiteboards. This is not about process. It is about walking a mile in the other person’s shoes, be that an end user, a technical buyer, a project sponsor, or an implementation partner, spending time seeing what hoops they have to go through to implement or use your products or simply to do business with you. No matter how good you were in the pre-digital era, there will be a ton of room for improvement, but it has to be focused on their friction issues, not yours. Work backward from their needs and problems, in other words, not forward from your intentions or desires.

Lesson 3: Digital transformations cannot be pushed. They must be pulled.

This is the hardest lesson to learn. Most executive teams have assumed that if they got the right digital transformation leader, gave them the title of Chief Transformation Officer, funded them properly, and insured that the project was on time, on spec, and on budget, that would do the trick. It makes total sense. It just doesn’t work.

The problem is one endemic to all business process re-engineering. The people whose behavior needs to change—and change radically—are the ones least comfortable with the program. When some outsider shows up with a new system, they can find any number of things wrong with it and use these objections to slow down deployment, redirect it into more familiar ways, and in general, diminish its impact. Mandating adoption can lead to reluctant engagement or even malicious compliance, and the larger the population of people involved, the more likely this is to occur.

So what does work? Transformations that are driven by the organization that has to transform. These start with the executive in charge who must galvanize the team to take up the challenge, to demand the digital transformation, and to insert it into every phase of its deployment. In other words, the transformation has to be pulled, not pushed.

Now, don’t get me wrong. There is still plenty of work on the push side involved, and that will require a strong leader. But at the end of the day, success will depend more on the leader of the consuming organization than that of the delivery team.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

Image Credit: Pexels

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.






What Your Website Reveals About Your Brand

Leave a reply

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

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.






Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of July 2024

Leave a reply

Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of July 2024Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are July’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. Organizational Debt Syndrome Poses a Threat — by Stefan Lindegaard
  2. Do Nothing More Often — by Robyn Bolton
  3. Is Disruption About to Claim a New Victim? — by Robyn Bolton
  4. What Top Innovators Do Differently — by Greg Satell
  5. Four Hidden Secrets of Innovation — by Greg Gatell
  6. Rise of the Atomic Consultant — by Braden Kelley
  7. Do You Bring Your Whole Self to Work? — by Mike Shipulski
  8. Giving Your Team a Sense of Shared Purpose — by David Burkus
  9. Creating Effective Digital Teams — by Howard Tiersky
  10. Smarter Risk Taking — by Janet Sernack

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in June that continue to resonate with people:

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last four years:

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.






Rise of the Atomic Consultant

Leave a reply

Or the Making of a Superhero

Rise of the Atomic Consultant

by Braden Kelley

In today’s rapidly evolving world, the consulting landscape is undergoing a profound transformation. I was recently asked a series of questions to capture my thoughts on how the consulting industry and its employees will need to evolve to thrive in the coming years – including my thoughts on the creation of “superhero” consultants. The emergence of the “superhero” consultant is not merely a result of advanced tools and technologies, but rather the cultivation of essential skills and capabilities. As we navigate through this era of unprecedented change, it is imperative for consulting firms to foster a culture of flexibility, growth, and continuous learning. The future of consulting lies in the hands of those who can seamlessly integrate human expertise with artificial intelligence (AI), build meaningful connections in a hybrid work environment, and facilitate diverse perspectives to drive innovation. This article delves into the key attributes that will define the next generation of consultants and explores the obstacles that must be overcome to unlock their full potential.

Here are the questions:

1) What are the tools and technologies that a consultant should use to become a “superhero” consultant? Why are these specific tools/technologies important? How should these tools be used most effectively?

This is the wrong question. It is not tools and technologies that will enable “superhero” consultants, but instead the development of the right skills and capabilities. The future of consulting will require consulting firms to hire and develop employees that are:

  1. Flexible and growth minded – the world is changing at an accelerating rate and consultants more than ever before will need to be lifelong learners, comfortable with knowledge gaps and eager to become an expert in something on behalf of the client with each new project
  2. AI Taskmasters – the future of work is man and machine working together and consultants skilled at breaking down work to the right size (atomizing work) and assigning it to both human and AI workers
  3. Socially Savvy – remote and hybrid work is here to stay and even clients have soured on having consultants travel in every week, so “superhero” consultants must excel at building connections and relationships via internal, external and client social tools to both distribute/execute work and to source new work
  4. Skilled facilitators – as data and AI-generated work products become plentiful, sense-making rises in importance along with a diversity of perspectives – often in workshops facilitated by consultants
  5. Open Sourced – gone are the days of rinse and repeat projects powered by proprietary frameworks and IP, instead “superhero” consultants will excel at identifying the right tools and frameworks to bring to bear – from FutureHacking™ to Design Thinking to the Change Planning Toolkit™

The capabilities of tools and technologies will grow over time and new ones will emerge. The best consultants will constantly be scanning the horizon for new tools, technologies, and capabilities and leverage the above skills and capabilities to unlearn and then re-learn the best ways to create value for their clients.

2) What are the biggest obstacles that prevent consultants from being able to access or learn the steps needed to become a “superhero” consultant? What should be done to remove these obstacles to help make this transformation easier for more consultants?

The biggest obstacles that prevent consultants from becoming “superheroes” are internal – to both the consultants themselves and the firms they work for. Companies will need to examine their own policies, procedures, and training programs to right-size them for this emerging new reality. Firms will need to allow consultants to pick the right frameworks, tools and technologies for addressing client challenges – instead of limiting them to those owned by the firm. Consultants will need to shift their mindset from being experts in a particular tool or technology and towards being masters of the above skills and capabilities and experts in achieving key client outcomes. Firms will need to invest in the training and the technology necessary to provide AI’s built for purpose to accelerate the ability of consultants to more efficiently and effectively solve client challenges. Firms will also need to update their tools and methods for capturing and sharing knowledge to leverage AI capabilities at the same time.

3) What specific areas of consulting (eg. IT, finance, marketing, etc.) have the greatest potential to produce this new brand of “superhero” consultants? Why?

This new brand of “superhero” consultants will excel in a number of different disciplines because they will be able to not only find more efficient and effective ways to execute work traditionally performed by consultants (technology implementations, analytical work, etc.), but as they are helping clients transform the ways they perform different types of work, they will also be able to help clients identify new activities that will be made possible by the transformation and the new technologies and ways of working they bring with it. The reason is their focus on building skills and capabilities into which tools and technologies plug in – somewhat interchangeably.

Conclusion

The journey to becoming a “superhero” consultant is not without its challenges, but the rewards are immense. By embracing a mindset of lifelong learning and adaptability, consultants can harness the power of emerging technologies to deliver unparalleled value to their clients. The future of consulting is not about rigid frameworks or proprietary tools, but about the ability to unlearn and relearn, to innovate and collaborate, and to drive meaningful change. As we look ahead, it is clear that the most successful consultants will be those who can navigate the complexities of a dynamic world with agility and foresight. Let us continue to push the boundaries of what is possible and strive to create a brighter future for the consulting industry. Keep innovating!

p.s. Be sure and follow both my personal account and the Human-Centered Change and Innovation community on LinkedIn.

Image credit: Bing Copilot (Microsoft Designer)

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.






Creating Effective Digital Teams

1 Reply

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

Subscribe to Human-Centered Change & Innovation WeeklySign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.