Achieving business success in today's changing environment takes more than the time tested values that sustained us during the last century. Today the markets are unpredictable, and businesses need to rethink and reframe their strategies from the ground up. It is through a new way of thinking that we can transform our companies who struggle to adapt to today's environment into agile, successful organizations.
Subject To Change: Creating Great Products In An Uncertain World is written by four members of a leading experience and design company called Adaptive Path. In this book they attempt to demonstrate how successful business can and should use customer experiences to inform and shape the product development process from start to finish.
The authors lay the book down into eight basic insights.
First is that "The Experience is the Product." To deliver great products and services into an uncertain world you have to look at your customers and determine what are their abilities, their needs, and their desires. This is not meant to be done in an abstract form, but to really look at them. No longer is just adding additional features to an existing product sufficient to attract new audiences. You have to really visualize what the customer needs and adapt your product to satisfy those needs. Once you do that, you will understand that "the experience" is the product that you need to deliver.
From this you must grasp the idea of using experience as strategy. The only thing that matters is the experience, and to be successful you must have an experience strategy. This strategy has to be more than window dressing or lip service. It has to be what drives decisions about how the firm executes, maintains, and manages these experiences so as to create value for both the customer, as well as the firm.
You then need to find new ways of understanding people and make sure that they are no longer market segments or demographics. Here, by taking emotion, culture, context and the rest of the messy complex of human life into account leads to a new model for understanding our customers. The pitfall of most technology companies is that they focus on the technology and forget about the user experience. As the chapter pertaining to this new consumer relationship shows, you must know how to bring the user back into the picture.
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