Innovation through Ambiguity by Designing Thinking

1. Challenge:

My problem starts with an ambiguous customer request. The customer would like to have a new  product with better performance and lower cost. The ambiguity lies in how the customer use our  product. We know, over the years, our product has been used by this customer in over 10 sites  for different purposes, but the customer is unwilling to disclose the details on how they use our  product and they are also unwilling to define performance specs.

Within our company, business team would not accept lower price on existing product as this will  hurt our margin. The business team would also like to have a differentiating solution.

2. Selection & Application:

I start with mind mapping tool because I wanted to understand the pain points of customer and  potential innovative solutions to the pain points. I organized a meeting with our product design  team, engineering team, business team and customer advocate team. We each propose  potential pain points we heard about this product. We also propose ideas that address pain  points. Then we grouped the pain points and ideas together, each with gaps and  differentiations. We created visualized charts/cartoons to map our ideas to address the pain  points and hosted an interview session with our customer. We presented our ideas to the  customer and welcomed their feedback. Through several round of interviews, we were able to  map out key gaps of current product and agreed on the key innovations need to be made.

The second tool I used is learning launch. Knowing it’s very costly (over multiple millions) and  time consuming (over six months) to test an idea to full scale, we aligned with customer that we  would pick several applications of theirs and run pilot test. We started with internal pilot test and  when results are positive, we moved to customer application site and run a larger pilot test  there. If the results were negative, we analyze the pilot test and find the solutions to neutralize  the negative results. We operative in Agile model and considered each learning launch (pilot  test) as a scrum. We group with customer every two weeks to mark progress and identify gaps.

3. Insight:

The mind mapping tool made me think more boarding on customer pain point and helped me  addressed the issue with cost down. Through mind mapping, we realized the real pain point is  not the cost of existing product but the shelf-life of the product being short, so the customer had  to discard 20% of the product. We addressed the matter by reformulate existing product and  that really improve customer relationship.

The learning launch tool is already adopted in our industry. The major benefit I gained from the  learning launch is to combine it with Agile model. By reducing the product design to small  learning launches, we were able to gather data/feedback more efficiently as the stakeholder  could see the improvement/gaps in shorter amount of time and focused on features changed  over each scrum.

4. Approach:

If I had to run this project a different way, I would start the mind mapping tool earlier in the  process. We had identified some innovative ideas through mind mapping but had to drop them  because we did not have enough time to implement.

