Simple Can Be Great!

Elizabeth Weber's recent visit to Lowe's provided many insights she's recorded in a great blog on Medium. It's enlightening and eye opening for B2C or B2B2C businesses. Innovation doesn't always have to be grand, expensive and complicated...sometimes, simple is really great.  Think of your business - there are applications and lessons here for anyone. 

"Lowe’s launched the Lowe’s Innovation Labs in June 2014. The Labs uses a method known as sci-fi prototyping to explore new customer experiences, such as customers walking into a Holoroom to visualize flooring in a virtual replica of their home, or customers talking to OSHbot, the Lowe’s robot assistant to learn where lawn mowers are located in the store. Lowe’s is exploring the technological and UX frontier for retail shopping, and it is incredible.  But are there simpler, and less expensive ways to improve customer experience in our digital age?" read the rest....

Elizabeth Weber is a User Experience Designer in San Francisco.  She a Brown '14 graduate where she launched it's first accelerator, Brown Venture Labs as president of the Entrepreneur Program.  She was the Branding Strategist for Speak Your Mind Foundation and served as a Design Researcher and Product Manager to the President of Brown University in the creation and launch of BrownConnect.

Where Do You Stand?

Where we stand, physically, intellectually, and emotionally, affects what we see and how we see it.  Even when it appears we are standing in the same spot, we are in different spots.  Why? Because when we look at anything, it is through the lens of what we’ve already seen, heard, felt, known.  It’s hard to truly look at anything anew, as if we’ve never seen it before.  That’s why it’s critical to have multiple people, with multiple backgrounds, experiences, talents, and histories look at a problem from multiple perspectives.  That’s why it’s important to listen, hear, and respect them.  That’s why it’s imperative to try to see what they see how they see it – not how we want them to see it.

So where do you stand? Where do you let others stand? And do you listen? Really?

Note: I love this painting for obvious reasons and if anyone knows who the artist is, please let me know!

No Compelling Value Proposition? No Business Needed!

Alex Osterwalder & team have created the definitive easy-to/must-uses guide on how to create a compelling value proposition - Value Proposition Design.  Yes, definitive.   Any business is first and foremost about the customer, even though it seems so many have forgotten that.  If you don’t have a compelling value proposition, you don’t need a business model because you won’t have a business. 

Value Proposition Design (#VPDesign) clearly teaches how to discover customers’ real needs – the needs they have for and by themselves, not the needs we want them to have or the needs we want to solve…even if they aren’t really the customers’.  The VPDesign toolkit – which is easy to follow, use and adopt – makes it difficult to retain your own biases and see reality.

It’s not just the words. The fabulous visual and symbolic style of the book makes it easy to follow, to use as a handbook and daily tool for prototyping, testing, iterating and creating meaningful and valuable solutions for customers. The icons are memorable and can become part of your team’s lexicon for thinking about customers. Just as in Business Model Generation, this book is a tool to use daily to think about your business – internally and externally. I’ve used the VPDesign extensively with entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs and for customers outside the organization and inside the organization.

So, you MUST get this book (and Business Model Generation) and start using it.  It will change how you view your business, your customers – for the better, in ways you can’t even begin to imagine.

In full disclosure, I helped co-create Alex & Yves’ first book, Business Model Generation, was a pre-reader for Value Proposition Design book and is a friend of Alex's.  And that's why I know, first-hand, how incredible and necessary these books are! Get them!!