How long will it take to complete a customer centric product?
What does it take to know you are making the right product for the customer?
What if lean innovation can help to reduce cost and make your products to the market faster?
In simple term, lean is a process where cost can be reduce, while improvement can be done along the way to meets customer demands. In a nutshells lean innovation consist three components which is build, measure and learn. It is a cycle that supporting each other to get a products to keep on improving and getting better. Gone are the days where organization take months sometime years to come out with new products. Nowadays new feature can be seen on weekly sometime on daily basis especially cloud related products such as Facebook, Google, Spotify and Microsoft 365.
Normally in lean innovation it starts with understanding the needs of customer to resolved their problems. Understanding the value of customer problem is crucial in making a decisions to create a customer centric profit base solution to the market or a low demands products that won’t have a return of investment for the organization. Once the needs and wants are understood, building a most viable products (MVP) is where the saving coming from. Instead of doing a full fledge products that don’t have any data or demands in the market, MVP does help to keep the cost low at the same time measuring impact of the products in the market place.Once MVP are ready, the next step will be take it into the wild to test it into the market. Does the MVP meets the early adopters needs or its only a run in the park products that don’t have a demands in the market? As an example, Instagram start as a product to share a location called “bourbon” but did not meet the need of the market at that moments instead people love to see the effects on the picture which actually a small features in the earlier version of the application. Instead of shutting down the projects, bourbon become Instagram where people can share their photo with additional “filter” function int the platform. And from there, they keep on innovating without shutting down the platform with more function such as “boomerang” and “IGTV” to be more connected to the user and filling the needs from their market demands.
Once the measure step is done, the unique elements in lean innovation is to keep on learning new things and keep innovating without disturbing the comfortable experience of the end user. The learning elements is actually what makes lean innovation keeps on moving. The learning will makes the MVP to keep on upgrading and complete the cycle of the process. Once the data is proven enough to works in the market, then MVP design can be upgrade and improve into a better version for the market to accept it.
With this simple cycle of lean process, innovation can be cost effective, data demand driven, and faster response to and from the market. Start your lean innovation process now and looks at the result!
