Designing new products & services
Re-Imagining Business
Looking outside-in
“LEF provide context & advice in a challenging & volatile environment. They tangibly support my team in developing methodologies to enable success in new business areas with the right combination of thought leadership, advisory & coaching.”
Charles Degutis
Director of Product Management
Robert Bosch GmbH
Organizations are having to quickly reshape market offerings to remain competitive. Cultivating an outside-in mindset beyond the organization is a powerful way for a business to assure its future. Creating a picture of customers’ current and future needs, set against evolving supply ecosystems and technology trends, helps you to explore unknown unknowns.
Visually representing customer needs, organizational capability, and market trends simplifies complexity and lays out choices in an accessible way that facilitates executive discussion. Leading Edge Forum uses Wardley Maps to help enterprises identify future customer needs and fulfilment, and necessary transitions. Just as critical, Wardley Maps exposes assumptions, and thereby highlights the level of experimentation that’s essential for a business to flourish.
Visually plot future customer needs
Rapid change and fluctuation across digital economies means organizations are getting accustomed to pivoting and changing their business models and platforms. Nowadays, figuring out how to optimize products and services and take them to market is a team effort, including – at least – the chief strategy officer and heads of business units. Having a method that visually maps market shifts, technology innovation and other disruptions is incredibly helpful in enabling fluid teams to figure out next moves.
A trigger point for enterprises seeking new perspectives on customer and product strategy is often the arrival of a new entrant or disruptor in the market. The connected car, which collects data in real time about wear and tear on individual components and maintenance vulnerabilities, is a prime example. Whereas car owners once booked an occasional service for their car, the rich data now available lets manufacturers build deeper relationships, creating more touch points, and more business opportunities.
Learn how to look laterally
It’s not only digital innovation and capabilities that business leaders must keep an eye on – sometimes disruption happens because of a paradigm shift, and that calls for lateral thinking. Nokia dominated the mobile phone manufacture in the 1990s and predicated its domination on portability, continuously reducing screen size and gadget weight. Its supremacy in the mobile phone market was upended by a CEO obsessed with user experience, and his Apple iPhone with its bigger, sleeker screen, attained ubiquity.
Forgetting to look sideways as well as ahead is a familiar shortcoming, and a common reason for the fall of business empires. Businesses that focus only on the norm, and how to win in current circumstances, forget to look sideways and don’t see paradigms shifting. Had mobile manufacturers at the time looked at the ecosystem that the iPhone leveraged, such as digital photography and media streaming, it may have been possible to anticipate the challenger.
Spot inertia, identify differentiators
The value of Wardley Maps also lies in surfacing what’s obscured or ignored in the everyday activity and noise of running an enterprise. In LEF’s experience, companies don’t always realize where their inertia lies – and sometimes they don’t know their greatest strength, either. A company that prides itself on product design and innovation, for example, may discover that this capability depends on excellent data mining: recognizing the true differentiator may open up new and different opportunities or ways to protect existing business.
Another shortcoming in companies trying to capitalize on emerging new digital capabilities and ride the crest of digital disruption, is a lack of capabilities or leadership in the emergent space. Manufacturers of physical products may have tunnel vision and struggle to identify necessary future capabilities and skills needed to make the shift in software development.
Build insight on a cross-disciplinary team
As ecosystems interconnect and the world becomes more complex, the need to look far and wide increases, and it takes a cross-disciplinary team to do the job. The coronavirus pandemic is a universal disruptor that every organization around the world must contend with. Drawing on multiple perspectives within their teams will be an essential exercise for businesses trying to picture the implications and possibilities that lie ahead in the short and medium term.
Resilience is a key theme – manufacturing patterns will likely change as businesses try to bring capacity closer to home, and the winning capability to scale fast has also emerged. But every organization will need to fashion its unique response. LEF’s expertise in Wardley Maps to facilitate cross-team collaboration and visualize the future helps companies identify products and services and how to land them – for current and future disruptions.
Workshop agenda
The outcome of the day will be to identify future customer needs and visually plot business opportunities. We will determine how to progress specific products and services, spot inertias and identify opportunities. You will understand where you need to pivot for optimum success, with a three month action plan to progress your journey.
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Workshop session
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Outcome
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Introductions & objectives
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Set expectations
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Agitate: get familiar with mapping
Create Wardley Maps & develop skills for situational awareness
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Level set & build confidence in language & approach
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Activate: build a Wardley Map for your business
Identify stakeholders, their needs & processes, current state, drawing value chains, assessing evolution & uncertainty
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Understand environment, influencing forces & expose business assumptions
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Activate: identify future business opportunities
Understand market shifts, tech innovation & other disruptions; visually plot potential business opportunities
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Identify future customer needs & fulfilment & necessary transitions
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Accelerate: test for specific products & services
Look laterally; examine what & how to progress; spot inertias & identify differentiators
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Understand where you need to pivot business for optimum success
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Action: confirm how we will test for these opportunities
Review outputs & next steps to progress journey
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Agreed three month action plan
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Gain clarity about unique differentiators,
strengths & inertias
Understand where to promote, where to
defend & where to experiment
Learn how to create multidisciplinary teams that can plot the future
Identify future products & services,
& how to land them
