1. Forces: Great teams see the forces at play, and capitalize on them
2. Superpower: Knowing and being aware of the one area where you have a unique skill or talent
3. Duos: The smallest entity in a team are duos, and they way they work together ultimately defines the success of the team.

The video is 23 minutes long, watch it for yourself to experience the full talk.

via 99u by Behance

In the years since the launch of the iPhone, we have observed an incredible increase in demand for the iPhone and other Apple products while Apple at the same time nearly doubled its production capacity every year. Apple is not just a world leader in design, but also a world-leader in operations, production and supply chain management. Most of these successes can be credited to Tim Cook, who was formerly COO.

It seems that much of Tim Cook’s thinking might have been influenced by a book called “Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition is Reshaping Global Markets as BusinessWeek reports

The new CEO is known to give colleagues copies of Competing Against Time, a book about using supply chains as a strategic weapon in business. According to Martin, the logistics executive, Cook uses a catchphrase to hammer home the need for efficiency: “Nobody wants to buy sour milk.”

A brief review

The book itself has been published in 1990 and while we tend to think that these concepts might have been outdated by globalization and the rise of the Internet, the book covers time-less topics that are relevant today as ever.

Admittedly the book talks a lot about experience curves, portfolio theory and the benefits of reducing complexity in traditional manufacturing processes. These chapters might not contain a lot of straight applicable learnings for somebody working in non-manufacturing, but it is an excellent primer with clear examples about the challenges and opportunities in manufacturing and operations management.

The chapters about gaining advantage by focusing on time-based aspects with regard to customers and money management which are applicable to a broader range of industries and are probably more relevant today than they have been in 1990.

The book ends with chapters on organizational design and time-based strategy, again with plenty of example that can be applied to a broad range of industries. Again many ideas and concepts that can be transferred and the book shows again its timeless nature.

All in all, I can highly recommend the book, it’s a refresher on the basics of operations, production and supply chain management and is a unique book that focuses on time as a strategic differentiator to gain a competitive advantage.

Printed and electronic versions (for Kindle) of the book are available at Amazon US, Amazon UK and Amazon Deutschland.

60 Minutes is the same show that introduced design thinking to a broader audience in 1999 with the now famous shopping cart video.

The videos is also available on cbsnews.com.

Satisficing has been introduced into modern decision-making by psychologist Herbert Simon and has received attention as an alternative to optimal decision-making strategies. It also helps to understand and explain decision-making that lead to sub-optimal outcomes.

Theory: finding the optimal decision

The Theory of Optimal Decision making assumes that humans strive to make decisions in a way that no other available decision option will lead to a better outcome.

It turns out that while this concept is in theory conclusive, real-world decision-making follows a different strategy.

Practice: finding the first solution that works

In reality, we often strive for the first decision that works. Simon realized this as well, stating that “[...] most complex problems are solved using an approach called “satisficing”. Satisficing means accepting the first solution that works, rather than seeking the best possible or optimal solution”

In other words, organizations are happy to find any needle in a haystack, rather than searching for the sharpest needle in the haystack.

Awareness about your decision-making bias

There is nothing inherently wrong with a satisficing decision-making strategy, it is just necessary to be aware of your own cognitive bias.

Especially in situations when one is stuck with “analysis paralysis”, the deadlock of gathering and analyzing data to find all possible decision options, forcing yourself to identify and pursue one decision that works could be a way out of being stuck.

Nevertheless situations when you become extraordinarily excited by a potential solution (i.e. the “brilliant” new marketing idea or the “revolutionary” startup idea) it might be helpful to take a step back and reflect whether you are prematurely satisficing or have indeed found the best potential solution.

“We do no market research. We don’t hire consultants. The only consultants I’ve ever hired in my 10 years is one firm to analyze Gateway’s retail strategy so I would not make some of the same mistakes they made [when launching Apple's retail stores]. But we never hire consultants, per se. We just want to make great products.”

A common argument is that since Apple does not need market research and is able to create highly , do we really need it in our company as well?

Apple can follow such an approach because the company is in a unique situation:

“We did iTunes because we all love music. We made what we thought was the best jukebox in iTunes. Then we all wanted to carry our whole music libraries around with us. The team worked really hard. And the reason that they worked so hard is because we all wanted one. You know? I mean, the first few hundred customers were us.

It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do.”

The requirements for skipping user research

I think it is possible to skip user research in two situations:

1. You are designing the product for yourself.
2. You spend so much time with your customers that you know exactly what they want and need.

If these requirements are not given, the gap between an organization’s understanding of customer needs and the actual customer needs is probably large. If this gap is small then the conclusion should be that as long as you are designing products and services for yourself the outcomes should demanded by customers.

I call this gap the “CEO – Customer Gap”.

The CEO – Customer Gap

In order to understand this gap better it would be insightful to measure the size of this gap. By defining two measuring points we might better understand how big the distance between an organization and it’s customers is.

Focusing on the CEO as a representative gives a clear measuring point and puts the CEO as the key representative of an organization at the center of attention.

The CEO – Customer Gap is something that should be explored, measured and minimized to increase success of new products and services.

A company where employees needs are congruent with customer needs and employees intuitively create the products and services because they want them to be like that for themselves will be more successful than a business built around market research studies, customer experience management or the latest innovation management fad.

It turns out that there is a still lot of confusion around the term customer experience. While nearly everybody agrees on the overall importance of customer experience I have observed that perspective on this topic can be strongly diverging.

This leads to a Babylonian Confusion where two parties converse about a common topic named “customer experience” but ultimately talk about completely different topics.

The reasons are not just in the individual background of the individuals but also their organizations, the structure inside the organization and the relationship between businesses and their customers.

Intuitively one might to try to unify these different perspectives on customer experience management. Instead I argue to accept these different perspectives and accept that different context leads to a different understanding and perspective on customer experience management.

I would like to take a look at some of these perspectives that I have observed in conversations, presentations and books.

The measure & manage perspective

This approach is defined by a very strong focus on measurement and management following the mantra “If you can’t manage it, you can’t manage it”. Following such a logic customer experience becomes primarily a measurement and survey task, sometimes merely an extension of existing customer satisfaction measurements. Following a philosophy of continual improvement, activities will then be initiated to improve customer experience KPIs.

This approach is quantitative and fact-driven and creates the basis for a rational decision-making process. At the same time I think that a strong focus on managing KPIs creates a blind spot in situations when consumer expectations are changing in a short time. Everyone thought that BlackBerry is the de-facto gold-standard for smartphones until the iPhone came around and consumer behavior shifted.

The leadership & change perspective

The increasing division of labor has led to a situation where the majority of employees and managers in an organization never get in touch with customers even though they are working on projects that directly impact customers. Interacting with customers is in many companies still perceived as an activity performed by low-level employees and once an employee moves up the corporate ladder he does not need to interact with customers anymore.

In some corporations having achieved the status that you don’t have to interact with customers anymore is a major achievement – because you are now a manager.

It turns out that such a corporate mindset only works to a certain point. After that an organization loses the connection with its customers, new products and services miss the needs of customers and customer service becomes a cost-center that needs its budget cut. Dozens of examples for such a mind-set can be found with airlines and telecom companies.

Only through a cultural change programs that are driven by top-management organizations aim to improve this situation and get their organization closer to customers again. This includes training, restructuring and letting go of employees and managers and even top executives.

If this is not approached as a short and painful turnaround process, it is an long-reigning process that requires long-term commitment from top-management (and investors). If the company is not in a turnaround mode, this process might take 2 years to get started, 5 years to see improvements changes and 10 years to observe a real change in corporate culture.

The innovation & design perspective

Ultimately the reason an organization exists is that its products and services are desirable by enough customers to create a sustainable business. Nevertheless developing new products remains a significant challenge and this is not just a set phrase. Ask any product manager or even startups how challenging it is to find an offering that gains traction with customers.

Even though you might have a great product, no industry is immune against disruption and the challenges i.e. Microsoft experiences with their Surface platform and Windows 8 should act as a reminder that even companies with unlimited resources struggle in this domain.

Despite the inherent challenges of new product and service development I think that with the right processes, methods and techniques the chances of new product design can be greatly increased. And ultimately it’s these new products and services that hopefully create a positive customer experience.

The marketing & sales perspective

Customer experience also turned into a buzzword that can be found in dozens of marketing brochures and sales presentations. Every CRM application, call-center management software and customer survey tool is not just what it was, it has become a “customer experience platform”.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the use of this – as long as it works for the people and companies involved everything is good. Even a company selling customer experience {solution | platform | technology } can only get so far on buzzwords alone.

A conclusion

I don’t claim that these perspectives are mutually exclusive or collectively exhaustive. I’d rather think that these perspectives help to understand the different context and corresponding challenges. And this also gives a partial answer where this site might be headed in the future.

Due to my personal background (running a new product & service incubator and doing consulting with a selected group of innovative companies) I will primarily focus on the innovation and design perspective. We will certainly touch on topics of leadership and change management as well as the broad topic of “measuring customer experience” but always with the main question in mind:

The Ultimate Question

How can we become better at bringing better products and services to market?

User interactions and usage behavior on a Smartphone might be different than on a tablet, and a tablet might be used completely differently than a desktop computer. One solution for content-driven websites is the usage of so-called responsive designs which have a common core but can adapt to different screen sizes.

Apple and Microsoft: Two different design strategies

Interactive websites or software applications are a different story and it seems that Apple and Microsoft follow different strategies with that regard. Apple seems to follow the strategy that an application on a desktop will be used differently than on a mobile device and therefore different user interfaces should be different as well. The best example is Pages on the Mac and Pages on the iPad – different UIs optimized for different usage.

Microsoft on the other hand aims for a closer integration between desktop and tablet computing follows a different approach. The new version of Microsoft Office incorporates a Touch Mode which  basically scale the user interface to make the clickable regions bigger.

An example of this can be seen in the images below.

Touch Mode Off:

Touch Mode On:

The jury is still out on whether Apple’s approach or Microsoft’s approach is the right approach to mobile computing. I tend to go into the direction that if you are starting from scratch, 2-3 different UI strategies should be applied for different screens. Unfortunately this also requires significant budgets and in the absence of such development budgets an approach similar to the Office Touch interface seems feasible.

At the end it comes down how users are using the application on different devices and different screens and based on this recommendations can be derived.

via Office Next – Using the new Office with touch.

Whether it is checking a hotel on TripAdvisory, researching a product on Amazon or finding the lowest price on Priceline.com – the truth about quality and price of a product are now transparent like never before. With drastic consequences for businesses big and small.

Serial Entrepreneur Jason Calacanis argues that this is the beginning of the The Age of Excellence, where mediocre companies are unable to survive because it is just so easy for consumers to find this information.

You see, in the old days, it was about distribution, location, marketing spend, celebrity endorsement, traffic buying or the black art of search engine optimization.

??Today it’s about getting a positive net-promoter score and making your five-star histogram look like a gun: a lot of five-star reviews coupled with some four-star reviews make the barrel. A dramatic drop-off to three stars, followed by slightly fewer two- and one-star reviews, makes the handle of your gun.??The quantity of reviews, of course, reinforces this pattern.

How many times have you seen the gun in the App Store and just clicked “buy” without thinking about it?

Now, how many times have you seen a histogram that looks like an upside-down gun and run for the hills? Exactly.

This resonates with what Google calls the “Zero Moment of Truth“, the moment when consumers automatically use a search engine to find out more about a product or service before their purchase.

The consequence of this is that mediocre products can not be hidden behind marketing tricks anymore. Once consumers find out about a crappy product, they will share this knowledge and sales will be negatively impacted.

At the same time this sets a clear standard about the quality levels that are expected when delivering new products or services. Either your reviews form a gun or it’s time to go back to the drawing board and come up with something that leads to a gun-shaped ratings histogramm.

The Knowledge Gap

The distance between current knowledge and target knowledge has a technical name: “The Gap”. (Subsequently, an entire chain of clothing stores was named after it!)

The Knowledge Gap is where design happens. We don’t need to design to the left of current knowledge point, because it’s all stuff the user already knows. And we don’t need to design stuff to the right of the target knowledge point, since the user won’t be needing that information (for this task, at least). We only need to design the interface for the space in between current knowledge and target knowledge. (See a picture of the Knowledge Gap here: )

Users can complete their objective when current knowledge equals target knowledge. There are two ways this can happen. You can train the user, thereby increasing their current knowledge, until they know everything they need to know. Or, you can reduce the knowledge necessary, by making the interface easier, until target knowledge only requires the information the user already has. In fact, most good design involves both: users are trained (through explanatory text and other devices) while the designer reduces complexity, reducing the gap distance from both directions.

Not groundbreaking, but a nice visualization and explanation.

He explores Swiss and Japanese Design Trends, the meaning of good design as well as the convergence of graphic design and industrial design.

Good user interface design takes care of irritations before they appear. Good design is invisible. Good screen design happens in the subatomic level of microtypography (the exact definition of a typeface), the invisible grid of macrotypography (how the typeface is used), and the invisible world of interaction design and information architecture. Minimum input, maximum output, with minimal conscious thought is what screen designers focus on.

Nothing is more destructive to good design than group thinking and collective decision making. Why? As I said, to most people good design is invisible. Group decisions focus on the visible, bad aspects of design.