6 Strategic Steps to Designing Digital Businesses

Photo by Halacious on Unsplash

Today, I am giving a talk to the UX Redgate Meetup community about how my team and I have been designing new digital ventures in a customer-led way. Click here for the slides.

I covered a lot of ground in this talk, not all at the level of detail I would have liked. I’ve written a short summary of the topics covered and I will be writing new articles in the coming days/weeks exploring each of them in more detail.

• Identifying the disruptive domain: finding focus at the start of a new venture is really important. It’s important not to start too broad, but it’s also key to understand the market dynamics that make the space you’re innovating in a truly disruptive one.
• Prioritising what to design: You might have decided that you want to design a new financial service for an emergent customer segment unserved by the industry. What do you design? I’ve used Jobs to be Done for a long time now to identify and prioritise the most important underserved jobs customers are trying to get done.
• Designing the experience: So you’ve identified your priority customer Jobs to be Done, but what do they mean? Using the Jobs to be Done canvas (in the slide pack), you can map out the context of the jobs, the current pain points, the desired state or outcome the customer is trying to achieve and the blockers in making that progress.
• Designing the brand: Jobs to be Done provides great insight into product design and is the foundation for messaging the benefits of your product or service. However, people don’t just buy products they buy stories. To resonate with your audience today your need to connect with culture and your customers’ belief system to develop your own unique Story to be Told.
• Defining your purpose: There are two types of purpose; product and brand. A product purpose comes from building a product or service around Job to be Done. A good sign of when you’ve got this right is when your brand or product gets used as a verb e.g. “Google it” or “Monzo me”. A brand purpose is a mission statement on how you will positively change the world. This is nothing new, it’s now table stakes. We now live in a post-purpose world where you need to be a responsible actor in the global community, your incentives need to align with your stakeholders and you need to embed diversity and sustainable values into the DNA of your business.
• Build community: Whilst you’re designing and building your proposition you should also aim to build community that are bought into your (post) purpose vision. You have to think carefully about the value exchange to ensure it’s not just one way. If you get this right you can create really insightful customer feedback loops, test product, brand and content collaboratively and also think about how you build community into your value proposition. If you get this right you will drive customer advocacy, word of mouth and lower customer acquisition costs.

If you want to hear more about these topics follow me over the next few weeks as I start to publish a more detailed account.