What is needed to achieve quicker time-to-value?
Understanding the requirements for a specific feature or function is important when trying to define what needs to be built. Unfortunately, it’s done far too early in the product discovery and design process. Successful digital products require an early and ongoing focus on end-users to identify and solve the problems that stand in the way of customers achieving their outcomes. Success lies in solving customer problems not gathering feature requirements.
Nortal recently worked with a large wholesale distribution company that wanted to generate more e-commerce sales by reinvigorating its mobile channel with modern capabilities, enabled by a new tech platform. Instead of starting with stakeholder requirements and feature backlogs, we helped our client engage current customers and partner stores to better understand the outcomes each group wanted to achieve. Along the way, we collaboratively explored the problems that stood in the way of accomplishing specific jobs to be done.
Here are few simple but insightful questions we raised with real end-users:
- The outcome: what is the job you are hoping to get done?
- The value: what is the result of getting the job done?
- The problem: what pain points stand in the way of getting the job done?
With these actionable insights, Nortal helped the client ideate potential solutions for the customer problems raised. We then prototyped specific end-user experiences that addressed high priority pain points, allowing customers to realize quicker time-to-value in the jobs they completed. Rather than starting with feature requirements, our client now has a customer-focused solution that was outcome-driven and experience-led.
In addition to designing the new mobile solution for customer value and usability, we also assessed it for business viability and tech feasibility. Using the same approach, we explored what problems stood in the way of delivering the desired business outcomes. This helped our client identify the business functions i.e. sales, marketing, operations, and customer success, needed to support an improved mobile end-user experience. Improvements in customer time-to-value, sales and profits will follow. We then explored how these capabilities could be more effectively enabled through data, technology, people and processes – resulting in a new solution architecture for the mobile app.