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A topic I am interested in for quite some time now is how startups can use service design in their day-to-day work.

I recently gave a talk on this topic during the Service Experience Conference 2016 in San Francisco. As some people asked me to share this talk, I decided to summarize all related links in this short post.

I named my talk "Service Design and Startups: This Lean Agile Design Thingything" to share my perspective on the ongoing discussion in our community on what is the difference between service design, design thinking, ux, cx, agile, lean everything, etc.

I then present how we practice service design in our company More than Metrics (with our products Smaply, ExperienceFellow, and Mr.Thinkr) and some lessons learned from my work with other companies.

You can find my slides here on slideshare and a video of my talk here on vimeo.

Let me know what you think... :)

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InspiredStartups.com
User is Hero by IoT supported shopping experience

"Leaders must keep in mind that the customer is the superhero and your job is to tell them how your product will help them become a hero." (Donna Lichaw)

The history of product innovation has repeatedly shown that companies who ignore the user in favour of the technology fail. They fail because they fall victim to what is now known as the ‘stack fallacy’. (read on article)

Slack, Uber, Facebook, Google, even Microsoft have proved Sharma right. Success in any given market always comes down to the same fundamental question, “Who understands the user better?”

Product managers have traditionally discussed products in terms of solving problems. But in a hyper-competitive world it’s no longer enough to simply solve a functional problem. You need to understand your user’s story.

Which is why it’s gratifying to read Clay Christensen's recent book 'Competing against Luck' in which he revisits his theory of Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD). Almost 20 years old, it's the ‘newest old idea’ in product. Only now is it being fully appreciated by a new generation of digital product designers.

JTBD’s perennial relevance stems from its singular focus on the context, mindset and desired outcomes of the user, rather than the attributes of the product itself. It’s a form of storytelling, with the user at the centre of the narrative rather than a peripheral player. Product practitioners who embrace the method start by articulating a product’s ’Job Story' before considering design details.

Christensen points out that companies that view their business through the Job lens are much less likely to be disrupted by upstart challengers, in the way hotels have been by AirBnB or taxis have been by Uber. Teenagers have always wanted to communicate with each other in private. Once they passed notes to each other in class, now they send messages via Snapchat.

The user’s Job Story rarely changes. It’s the means of achieving it that is dependent on the technology available.

Christensen is adamant that Job Stories are 'discovered' (rather than written) and that they have both functional and emotional components.

For a product designer, the Job lens shifts one’s focus away from features to the outcomes users can expect to achieve from using your product. It also transforms one’s understanding of the competitive landscape.

Traditional marketers tend to focus on superficially similar products. As a consequence, product teams tended to compete solely on features or attributes: more memory, less sugar, a better camera.

Reed Hastings views Netflix through a Job lens. His understanding of where they compete is expansive:

"We compete with everything you do to relax. Think of any night you did not watch Netflix. We compete with drinking a bottle of wine. That’s a particularly tough one."

Whale's Justin Kan is more brutal in his assessment:

"Startups mostly don't compete against each other, they compete against no one giving a shit."


READ FULL ARTICLE

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