Lab it up to win markets and consumer love.
Products for the future, are designed in the present
Your venture - be it your product, or startup or platform is being designed and built in the present as we speak, while it will launch and engage customers in a near-future time. So it is hyper-critical that you design and build your ventures - future backwards. With an eye on what the markets and consumers will be, by the time your product hits the market.
Future backwards is a management practice that encourages scenario building, ideating, imagining ventures and adventures from the safety of boardrooms while leaders recognize that decisions taken might point their business in very different directions. It is based on the principle that strategy is not about predicting the future accurately. But it is about imagining possible new futures.
Smart innovations and products that change the world for the better and make consumers fall in love with them, benefit hugely from experimenting, iterating, researching, trend-spotting, consumer-mapping, segmenting and early-sighting of potential market-shifts. This ensures product - market fit (PMF as many refer to it). Remember it is not just the market conditions while making the product, but also the conditions expected to prevail when you launch.
Joining the dots and design are like a stitch in time
Your venture is most vulnerable and sensitive in its early years, Hence joining the dots, anticipating inflection points, matters in the very early part of your venture's design.
This is where a multidisciplinary venture design lab becomes ultra-useful.
Venture design or as we call it design by doing, helps you as a founder or business have an interdisciplinary team - with skills and expertise across agile strategy, productive research, ideation, design, technology, product development, branding + marketing, storytelling, working seamlessly with you. It's like having your own support team work alongside you, ideating, building and designing.
Here's how it works
Viability - Check
Have an early stage idea that needs validation? Ideate and brainstorm with a venture design lab to fine tune / sharpen your idea or if needed muscle it. Get an outside-in perspective on whether the idea is viable in its present form (relevance, immediacy, scale, economics, so on and so forth). Get into a huddle and create a blueprint of the venture as your idea moves into its next phase.
This would your venture and product, fit the market better when it launches. It also helps you prepare and build the right defenses or moats for your business against both existing competitors and likely competitors in the near future.
Feasibility - Check
Using the most appropriate technology is not neccessarily about using the newest technology (many founders can go round in circles chasing the tech that is making the buzz but doing scant-nothing for their product or markets). And remember this is being done at a stage when you are building your solution and hence need to be nimble and judicious on costs. Your technology stack and design path have to steer clear of expensive mistakes or guess-work.
You need capital efficient, start-up friendly technology and a stack that is good for putting up the early stage version of the product if you are a start up.
The technology architects in the venture design lab would be able to translate your problem solving features and ideas into the most appropriate and founder-friendly technology stack.
Desirability - Check
Everything you have done so far and painstakingly put together comes to nothing if your product or venture is not desired or sought after by people that matter - your customers and markets. Putting together your product, equipping it with the right features, testing it time and again to ensure that it is fool-proof, weather-proof and dissonance-proof will have no use unless customers and buyers love and seek your brand or product.
Branding, design, customer experience, inspired storytelling, marketing and relevant content are indispensable to building a minimum desirable venture.
Creativity - Check
In a world of copy cats, "photo-copied" ventures and products which do not have an ounce of character or originality to them, will stumble to make a mark. Their lack of creativity or originality will catch up with them, more sooner than later. There are exceptions, but far and few.
Businesses and brands that are not distinctive or differentiated with a clear as glass proposition or do not have any character to them, struggle. They start looking like their competitors, are lost in a crowd and hence are constantly struggling to be noticed. And remember distinctive does not mean unique.
When creativity and design are missing, ventures and products look like "me-toos" and the only way they can compete or survive for whatever time they have on hand is through price cuts or giving discounts. Ultimately it is the product and the venture that suffers.
The worst condition is when you compete not on product merit, not on design, not on the quality of experience but on how high your discounts are or how long the sale sign is up. This happens when your product/brand/app has insufficient LOI (level of involvement) with customers.
Venture design helps solve this problem by bringing in creativity and true differentiation for your brand & business. Remember, it is a crowded and noisy market out there and hence your story and marketing have to be really well-thought out. Shouting louder just makes one a fish-monger. Also be careful of advice that says you can always do it later - second chances and second innings are rare when the first innings has been unremarkable and boring.
Some of the best and boldest ventures could be lurking somewhere in the fringes, as a scrawl on a notepad, as ideas amongst your associates or sketched on a napkin. It sometimes takes a few simple exercises and tools to start shaping them and designing them as viable, desirable prototypes. We work with forward thinking organizations to ideate, design and prototype test ventures with our design labs. This allows large firms and corporations to rapidly develop commerce worthy ideas and IPs.
This is a wonderful way for your business or corporation to seed potential ventures, that your organisation eventually owns. A venture design lab helps explore and refine new ideas, tailor products, build defenses for your brand and keeps a periscopic eye out for market shifts.
As a business design firm we work with you to start up, scale, or create markets. Our lab explores what your customers, employees, and partners want in order to create transformative strategies and experiences. NYUCT Design Labs is a venture design house that operates at the intersection of design, strategy, ideas and technology.