The following Insights post is contributed by Edward Boudrot, VP Product Strategy & Management at Optum and expert JPK Group Presenter.
How do you create that memorable, tangible, touchable and feel-able emotion-inducing thing? Will people fall in love with your thing? How do you get people to say, “That was an awesome experience!”
1. Begin with Deep Empathy & Needs Understanding
We all understand the basic need states of survival, enjoyment, freedom, companionship, comfort, protection and approval. But what about the learned needs of being informed, curiosity, cleanliness, efficiency, convenience, dependability, style, economy and bargains?
Highly successful products like PlayStation, Lipitor and Scrub Daddy have hit on a combination of these needs to be leaders in their respective categories. While other products like Breakfast Mates, Google Glass and the HP Touchpad missed the mark.
The reason people fall in love with your thing is because you have connected with them on a deep need or pain likely on many of the levels.
2. Leverage Both Art and Science
Process or science is incredibly important when it comes to repeatable measurable outcomes. Processes like product life cycle management and agile enable us to deliver. You could say that human centered design is also a process. The art is selecting the right tools at the right time, much like the artists are the masters of their craft. A little ethnographic research here a little experiment there and a little market research here.
The results can be stunning when put together by a true artist and creating love for your thing.
3. Creating the Team of Teams
In order to create things that people love, you need to create a high performing team that has deep empathy and love for which they serve. The leader of this team needs to be an artist that both protects and drives the creative process of art and science. They need to inspire learning and mindfulness in order to deliver great things. Enablement of the team depends on sustaining the creative culture, hiring and managing high performers, enabling open communication, being highly flexible and having a productive approach to experimenting.
High performing teams that have love for one another and the people whom they serve create things people love.
About Edward
Ed Boudrot is the Vice President of Product Strategy and Management at Optum, a health services and innovation company that combines data and analytics with technology and expertise to power modern healthcare. Bringing his background in technology startups, Boudrot specializes in the innovation of experiences, products, and solutions, and works to integrate human-centered design, market research, product management, development practices, and experience management.
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