Transcript

0:10 Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. This is one of the three laws of Sci-Fi author Arthur C. Clarke. You may be familiar with it. But have you thought about turning it on its head? How might we use magic to advance technology?

0:36 Hello, and welcome to Product Nuggets. I'm Thomas Essl and today I'll talk about how to focus on an opportunity area using magic. Not literal magic, of course, but we'll get to that in a moment. When building products you may often try to take a look into the future, defining your product vision, mission, long term objectives, etc. - whatever you want to call it. It can be hard to define what part of the process you should focus on. To solve this problem, we might throw out journey maps, value chains, and service blueprints. But those can be scary and time-consuming. You might also feel lost with all the ideas already floating around about what you might want to do, or what somebody else might want you to do. The method I'll talk about today is designed to help you choose. If today's Product Nugget sounds a bit out there at first, don't worry, we'll actually use quite a few elements you're probably already familiar with, such as user journeys, user stories, product principles, and how-might-we-questions. Let's dive in!

1:57 We start by laying down what we already know, intersect business and user value product principles, identified opportunity areas. The point is to reduce a complex view of a process to its bare essentials, such that you can reconnect the dots in hopefully an improved way down the line.

2:20 So to get started, put down three things. First, what is true about the business? So what is considered valuable, and in many cases, this might be things related to efficiency increases, cost reductions, or improved brand perception. Then put down what is true about your users, such as attitudes and characteristics. And we'll get to another element of this in a minute. And then, what is true about your product and this is the non-technical stuff like your product principles and what has always been true regardless of the functionality you've built. Those three things, they can be like really simple bullet point lists, you don't need to go into too much detail. The whole point of this exercise, again, is to try and keep things as simple as possible. So try to really generate a highly distilled view, just based on the knowledge that is in the room between you and your team members. You might also notice that I've ignored technical aspects such as feasibility for now. And that's very much on purpose. When thinking about what problems to solve for opportunities to leverage, there are two different ways to approach this. One is to start by looking at what is possible and then within that problem space thinking about what should be done. But that approach leads to a much smaller sample size than if you do it the other way around. If you start thinking about what you should be doing, and then try to think really hard how to make those things possible, you end up with a much greater number of quality ideas. So at this point in time, thinking about feasibility might not be the most useful thing to do.

4:26 Next, we focusing on another piece of information about our users. And that is to draw out the journey that we're looking at, the overall area that we're operating in. So if you're trying to design a flight booking engine, that would be the entire journey to get to a destination, probably maybe even beyond that, to get home to your holiday destination. Whatever your processes is, we'll draw that out, but we'll only draw the things that likely won't change regardless of any new process or technology. And this is where the magic comes in, because one way to approach this is to say: If there was some kind of magical intervention, what would happen next? What would still happen next? If I could magically get from one important point to the next, what would those points be? And often these are moments where something happens to people, they change location, they interact with each other, or they receive something essential an item or information. One way to think about this is two separate things your user wants to happen versus things they typically do to get there. And you can try formulating these objectives or user stories, but you don't need to you can just throw them on the whiteboard as bubbles. So for example, as a business traveler, I want to receive a plane ticket so I can board a plane to my meeting destination. Those things typically won't change, right? If you know you'll have to take a plane, then that's that. There is no teleportation. In order to get a plane, we know that regardless of what we do in the near future we'll always need a ticket. Those are just some basic examples. The opposite would be to go too granular, say, oh, I want to take out my phone and then open an app and then enter my details and so on. All of those things are likely to change depending on what our solution will look like. So that's what we're not looking for.

6:59 One trick here is to know how much magic to use. I've just touched on this a little bit already. But you might say, well, I'm in London now and then I'm in New York, job done. That level of granularity is probably not going to be very helpful in trying to assess a user's journey and trying to improve them. So if you zoom out too wide like this, you won't find this exercise very helpful. But if you're zooming in too much, you'll stick with constraints that you actually might be able to remove. So try to get the right balance here.

7:43 If you followed along, you should now have a kind of process map with very large blank areas in between each user objective. And now we'll get to circling in our area of opportunity. Look at each step while considering everything you put down in the first step, if you were to bring an improvement to each of these steps, what impact would it have in terms of your business value? What seems a natural fit to your product principles, and which areas would offer a natural extension to your offering in terms of how your users know it? Is this an adjacent step to something you're already helping them with, that your product can naturally grow into? Use your knowledge of business, people, and product to circle in on which of your magically created steps is the one you want to focus on.

8:43 At the end of this exercise, you should hopefully have your diagram on your whiteboard you have your list of items that generate business value, that are true about your users, that are true about your product, and you have rudimentary user journey and circled in areas that are really valuable through all your three lenses to focus on. And you can take that to continue any kind of product development process that you want. But don't throw it away because down the line, this can be very useful to go into things like brainstorming sessions, and you can start asking questions like, How might we get from one of these steps to the next, and then prioritize those ideas and so on. So, make sure you save it and refer back to it whenever any kinds of process or exercise you're going through might benefit from it.

9:52 I hope you found today's Product Nugget useful. Product Nuggets is produced by me, Thomas Essl. The theme song is Aeronaut by Blue Dots Sessions. If you liked this episode, please subscribe and rate it on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcast.

10:07 I'd also really love to hear from you. If you have any thoughts on this show or any ideas on topics you would like me to discuss, you can get in touch with me via Twitter @Thomas_Essl, or email me to hello@thomasessl.com.

10:23 Any opinions expressed in this episode are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of any current or previous employers. Thank you for listening. Till next time!

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