IoT Week 2019 - Design Empathy

I was incredibly fortunate to share the stage this year at the IoT Week 2019 in Aarhus, Denmark with some amazing colleagues from around the globe. Our panel was asked to speak on bringing a product-as-a-service to market.

Given the short time frame and the nature of these types of presentations, I asked myself, what can I give this audience in a short topic that might make a difference in their productization journey? As I was preparing, I kept returning to the same idea. What would I wish I had been given before I started my journey? The answer is empathy, empathy with everyone I was going to encounter on my journey. Read more to hear how I arrived at that message.

In October 2018, after returning from a long family weekend camping trip, I was at home with our daughter and my phone exploded with a loud notification, a klaxon tone usually reserved for being under attack in the military. This was the type of sound that you have no choice but to react to. As I quickly fished the phone from my pocket I saw a large notification "Crash Impact Detected - Honda CRV" .... my wife's car had been in a wreck. Immediately everything in my being, my entire world boiled down to one priority, getting in touch with my wife to hear her voice, to know that she was ok. My device maker called me and wanted to see if I was ok, I quickly told them I wasn't driving and hung up as I was in the middle of dialing my wife.... for those few seconds nothing else mattered in all the world. The car was utterly totaled, hit smack in the middle by a young man driving a little too fast. My wife answered her phone, she had walked away but did not know what to do, she was shaken to say the least.

This is a real-world IoT use case. I didn't care about dashboards, metrics, data streams, asset analysis, or predictive maintenance, I ONLY cared about getting in touch with my wife. I had to manage an exception, and the IoT device maker notified me about a critical event in the most natural and appropriate way possible.

Do we look at all of our use cases the same way? I received a short and clear message, and was able to respond immediately. Do I handle every use case with that same clarity and appropriate messaging? How do I respond to challenging scenarios? Let's examine one from my productization journey.

In late 2016, I was convinced that my company, Stibo Systems, could change the world of IoT, that we could help end the crashing projects and endless spending so many customers were suffering from, and I knew exactly how to do it. I was given resources to work on it, and began developing a solution. In late 2017, a new executive joined the company and was a key stakeholder that needed to understand and support my work. I was so passionate about the solution and so immersed in the IoT landscape that I explained my plan to end the global epidemic of suffering that was caused by the world not having our solution! He responded simply and directly with "So what?" I was presenting as a product owner, as a business line manager, but not as an executive. I didn't present the solution in his voice, to him as an audience. He wanted to know how this would affect the business of our customers, not the low level problems the features solved. I missed...

This meant I had to understand my audience better, I had to have some humility, I had to step back from gilded tower of problem solving excellence, and understand what I was doing from a new angle. I had to empathize with my executive and understand how he needed me to explain the value of our IoT strategy.

It took me back to my twenties to a book I read that changed my life. When Jeff Raskin wanted to design a user interface for a computer (the Macintosh project at Apple), he didn’t study computer science, or electrical engineering. Instead he went back to the tenements of psychology, and of industrial engineering. He stopped being an engineer, and became an architect. He changed his entire mode of operation and thought process to understand the needs of his audience.  I highly recommend his book “The Humane Interface”, it is available as a PDF online or you can find old copies of it on Amazon.

I had to once again change how I was approaching my audience, because it was much broader than the end-users I wanted to use the features of our solution.

I had to consider the executives whose support I desperately needed so that I would have the resources to get the solution to market. I needed the CFO to understand the commercialization strategy and business model. I needed the CMO and CPO to understand how this would fit with our roadmaps and brand in the marketplace. I needed the CEO and the Heads of Sales to believe in this so that I could get in front of customers. I needed the CTO to agree with my technology vision for scaling and resiliency.

Each of these sponsors in the productization journey speaks from a different point of view, they have their own languages and responsibilities. I had to understand each segment of my audience, and with empathy, understand what they were responsible to deliver to the company. Only when I did that, was I able to communicate to them the value of this strategy and solution.

As focused as I had been in that moment when my phone alerted me to a crash of my wife's vehicle, I had to realize that each member of my audience is focused on what they have to accomplish in their daily lives, and learn to communicate appropriately to them where they were, and not expect them to come to me.

What happens if we do the same and reconsider the services provided by nascent computing? Nascent computing is really what IoT and IIoT are all about, putting sensors and interfaces all over everything in the world so that near real time feedback can give us something we didn’t have before.

How do we empathize with the people that will consume the services we can offer through nascent computing? It can’t be the way we are approaching the topic today.  

What if we stepped back? What if we looked at the entire exercise from a “productization” mindset? 

What does it mean to “productize” something? Well, your cell phone is productized. It comes to you ready to use.  Regardless of your platform, Android or Apple, these are the most successful IoT / or nascent computing devices in history.  You open the box, you pop in your SIM card, the phone synchronizes with your provider’s network, and then you are suddenly downloading automatically all of your contacts, favorite applications, and photos and videos. The device is ready to use, from end to end.

The end-user experience is smooth and natural. Now what are the layers upon layers of technology that the providers have assembled to make this possible? This is where we are failing as an industry. 

For the last two and a half years I’ve been working on this problem, because I believe we all need the answer. I want to talk to you about observations on how we approach the problem, because everyone here has a role to play.

It takes a village

We are familiar with the term stack, but most of us look at only a portion of it at a time. I would say that if you are productizing anything, you have to be an expert at your area of focus, as well as knowledgeable of the rest of the team and what they need from you.

Let's start with a totally different example, and see how this would play out if we utilized empathy from the beginning.

If you've looked a trends in dieting the last years, you've probably seen the "Ketogenic" diet, or Keto for short. Let's productize "Keto" as a service! We will need to pull together a number of things:

·      A mobile application that manages recipes

·      A refrigerator that knows its inventory

·      Cooking appliances controlled remotely (an oven).

Now what is the value? 

·     The end user can select a recipe based on the food on hand, and prepare it with less effort, at a higher quality than ever before. We gave them better food and saved them money from ordering out, and they will lose weight because this Keto diet is great!!

·     The appliance makers can sell appliances with these new features, prompting users into a purchase they may not be motivated for otherwise.

·     The food producers who sell more premium grade food to a generation that is all but abandoning cooking at home.

Now we have to spend money to develop the mobile app, and we have to partner with an appliance provider to develop the refrigerator, oven, and possibly some other appliances, AND we have to get a major grocery chain involved.

We have our primary use case, the end-consumer, but who else is in our audience?

Our own executive suite, if the people who know us can't grasp the vision, how can we expect strangers to understand it?

The stakeholders at the appliance maker and the grocer.... they will be investing to make this a reality as well.

This doesn't take into account the product design teams at our partner organizations, their marketing teams, the supply chain from manufacturing, distribution, and retail of the new products that we have to deliver into the market, or the sales staff at the local home improvement store where a customer might purchase these hot new items.

If I am to productize an idea, I have to be ready to understand everyone in my audience because I'm no longer developing a product for a well understood audience, or resolving a well understood problem. If you are truly innovating, you have to understand everyone in your audience and prepare an answer for each of them, in their voice, in their tone, and in their medium of choice.

Empathy is the ability to share the feelings of another. You can only understand the feelings if you understand the pressures they are under. Take time to build relationships with people who are in your audience, invest in personal education so that you have a glimpse of their fields of work, and the problems they have to solve. They will each have their own vocabulary with terms you may not be familiar with yet.

You may be a great product manager, engineer, architect, designer, and that comes with a well deserved pride and sense of accomplishment. Now it's time to be new again, to be fresh and inexperienced. Become a student of your audience, empathize with them, and realize the end-user you want to serve is across an ocean of people whose help you need in this journey.

Best wishes on your productization journey and if you are on a journey today, please reach out and let's connect. We are a small community of innovators and as iron sharpens iron, we can help each other in these journeys.