Product Discovery Process:
We all know innovation is a buzzword, and every company, big or small, is looking to innovate to either gain a larger share of the existing market or create a new market altogether.
We often see brilliant ideas fail to generate value for the organisation and its customers. Would it have been great if we had a product discovery playbook to refer to?
Innovation in big, established firms is done a bit differently than in Startups. Here, I am presenting a product discovery flow around improving an existing product offering in a well-established company.
Beware of Law of Averages:
Recently, a few users contacted me and complained about the performance of one of our Enterprise applications. According to them, it took them more than 10 seconds to log in to the system. I couldn’t relate to it, so my first action was to open the monthly MI report sent to me a day earlier by one of my SRE leads. While going through performance metrics, I saw a graph showing an average response time of 0.2 seconds. So, where was the problem?
Problem with averages:
When dealing with averages, we tend to ignore underlined data distribution. When a single spike or anomaly has no impact on the dataset, the concept is acceptable, but when extreme cases dominate, we should discount the term average.
There is a great example given by Rolf Dobelli in his book “The Art of Thinking Clearly”: 50 passengers travel on a bus, and their average income is $50,000 per year. At the next stop, one of the passengers deboards and gets Bill Gates (with his annual fortune of $5 Billion).
Can we say that the new average wealth of the bus has shot up by $1 million? Will it be an accurate picture? A single outlier has radically altered the image, rendering the term ‘average’ completely meaningless.
So, in the data-driven world, we must be careful with averages.
Value Proposition:
We are a Diaper Brand with Premium Japanese Quality
Mamy Poko Pants Diaper
When MamyPoko pants entered the Indian consumer market, it was already dominated by big players like Pampers, Huggies, etc. However, MamyPoko pants came with a unique value proposition and penetrated this customer segment with its disruptive innovation strategy.
Unicharm, the maker of the Mamy Poko pants, has a healthy 36% market share in the Rs 4,700 crore Indian diaper market.
I was curious about Mamy Poko pants’ value proposition and hence came up with a canvas that its product people might have used during ideation.
Looking forward to the feedback.
And finally, thought of the day:
Product execution gives your salary, while innovation gives your pension.
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