Let's talk about digital products..

N: Your company is working for a long time now in service business and you’re doing product consulting, management, basically product conceptualization and innovations in that area. Besides all that you have some of your own products and I am going to go back to that later, but first I want to ask you some questions regarding the clients and their expectations when it comes to new products. I am asking this question with that first idea that they throw out about disruption. What clients are expecting when they wanna have a new product created?

Milos: That’s always a tough question to answer.

N: And the first one that we started today.

Milos: So like they expect everything. We positioned ourselves as a really venture product studio and like someone who is a problem solver and someone who works on behavioral changing solutions and that is how we try to talk with the right customers for us. But usually what the customers, when they come they are from the business background or something, they’ve seen something, they want something similar, they’ve seen a problem but they, you know, they come and say okay I want a Uber like services for black community specifically and like okay can it be cheap and can it be fast?

And I would say that are usually the problems like, people see something, they think it’s like now a commodity and they wanna just to reapplied and even if that’s like the case, like with all of the development of the tools, no code like other solutions out there it’s still hard to understand your target market. Like what’s, like how, what are their behavior, like what are they used to, what they do daily, what is the real solution for them, like how would you impact their lives. So, yeah, that’s most what we spend time analysing with clients and we try to eliminate their focus points are usually are: oh yeah, I wanna develop this feature and this feature and this feature and then we turn it back and okay but what it’s the outcome that it will develop, what do you wanna achieve? That’s our first introduction calls where we usually, I would say, we ask more about did you think this through, what are the next steps to find the right fit.

N: We are in similar businesses, we tackle similar problems and I know that this is the first step to understand the client to educate your client and give him expectations. So that is the first step, but after that it’s a team, right? I wanna ask you, your experience regarding when we talk about innovative product design, how it’s hard and what are the challenges to create a team and later on to lead it in that kind of area?

Milos: The team is very, very important and I think it’s a lot of the time it’s kind of neglected. People look at that oh yeah, I want this role, and whoever can fill it — it will create something. Reality is it will not and you have to work with the team, you need to educate and this is like we spend a lot of time internally in the company to create product minded thinkers, we call our engineer product engineers, we try to describe it by just the term but really that is someone who always will ask questions okay, what is the outcome, why I am working on this, what will happen and then this kind of questions and this kind of education can create better solutions in the end. Because someone even if your engineers are not working on specific tasks they are thinking okay when I am doing this, what will happen next, how this will grow or okay if I create a decision right now how that can impact for the future? The team has to include more people, that have to be, to understand the problem at hand, to really try to work together in innovation. I have to say they have to be co-located. People who talk, they have to be intensively talking, exchanging the energy, triggering users, talking with them, and then really sharing that in a very kind close setup. I mean, it’s been hard with covid.

N: That was a big question, what about remote working right now?

Milos: Yeah, which is working but not as effectively and not as creative as possible. We try to bridge that with a creative in persons sessions and that remote, like mostly, working.

N: Lets move to innovations itself. That is in the product design it’s core in innovation. I wanna ask you what is the beginning of innovations with this? How do you start to innovate in terms of product design? Can you share with me what frameworks you guys use?

Milos: Our framework would be probably the most similar to Google design sprints that they do, but I have to say to really creative innovation you have to understand what you are solving and who is who will be using it. Significant time really is spent with the users, mapping out their journey, mapping their thoughts, mapping their daily activities, where they go, what they do, what they do in life in general and what they do on the job they do. And then like iteratively then even working with them on analysing and testing conceptually product ideas, just to get early feedback. That really helps in the end. When you map all of these, every stakeholder in every business you start to understand all of the challenges and then even you can easily drop someone’s ideas, oh yeah, I wanted that feature like a glowing light in the corner because it is cool instead of really focusing on the problem.

N: From your perspective, you leading team that is doing innovation, what is your decision making process? How do you decide where to go next, what to do next?

Milos: Well, yeah, a lot of listening, I have to say, listening from users, listening to the metrics, listening to the impressions from the team, especially like customer, support customer success teams, just to understand what are the challenges like. Usually, there is always some important stakeholder, someone who is decision maker so you talk with them, you understand their problem and they have their own vision of some solution. In a way sometimes you have to go there. You have to test that. My approach is always be lean as possible. Create just enough to try to validate that, and than if it proves that its used, go ahead with it. Can not say that okay, this is definitely will solve everything. We had functionalities fully developed, they were like oh yes super, people were using it for a few weeks, months, and slowly startet to.. I would say ivasion, it was kind scheduler in a medical institution because it became hard for the nurses, they had to do a many things and we spend a lot of time on it but it’s sounded really as a good idea, you spend a lot of time already with everybody, the call of stakeholders yeah we need .. And then okay you just have to accept it, push it aside, what I attend to do is to always okay understand now, it’s good to learn. Why that went to the slippery slope, how we can improve it, maybe some problems are of integrations, maybe there are some windows to really focus more and maybe even bring much bigger value for the business there.

N: I will go back to the service business, I wanna just jump to the part, because I know you have your own product and one of them is Lasso . Can you explain to me how you came up with that product? How did you come to the idea first and why did you proceed to develop it?

Milos: It’s kind of a long story. I am a community builder, conference organizer, event organizer and it really started everything around hospitality, guest experience, that can be like attendees and because of that we went into a conference solution that we run now for five years and it’s slowly expanded but always I was searching where is the biggest chunk of needs. At one point we identified hoteliers, their internal really event management because they are the biggest, they have their needs, people coming, they book rooms, they book reservations, they book conferencing, usually they work with enterprises, there are many co-located conferences happening at one time. That was kind of our entry and the part of it was okay, guests do need stuff, we have operational headache, we want it efficiently , everything goes through the front desk so you have to call, you have to do everything and we said okay this is our guest experience, you can request new towels, request housekeeping or food and limit the interaction that really goes through the channels that are not traceable and that really overloads the front desk. That’s how it’s started. That’s the beginning of 2020. I found a good partner, a very experienced hotelier, someone who has been in industry. Everything fit together, we got few contracts in place, for the large hotels and then covid hits so we had to..

N: That was my question, what happens with covid because you’ve just entered the hotelier market that is practically dead now.

Milos: Especially we entered the events market first and then guests second because a lot of it we had already, kind a basic of these interactions, we already had developed over with the conferencing stuff. It happened that all contracts canceled, so yeah, it was not like oh, that’s too bad but simply okay there was no conference, events, nothing happened. The good thing is we kept very good communication and what covid brought to us, it’s a good thing, we started to be able to get everybody’s attention, really from the top, from property managers, property owners because they had more time and that was great. We could okay now iterate of all over, what this can become, what are their biggest pains and in one part we demonstrated some face ID matching, validation that this person coming in, integration into their property management systems and okay, what this can do, so we went okay there is good chunk that now, contactless it’s a big thing and we had like yeah, but we can really easily provide solution for contactless check in, go to your room, even skip front desk, maybe telecommunicate with them. That was our pivot, it turned out slowly to roll, we have now customers and we are talking with bigger chains that want to roll it into the future. It’s interesting because we usually talk with property owners and that’s like larger groups of hotels, the solution can easily go through many places at once.

N: We met I think three years ago and that time you have been work in one specific area that was so hyped then and now it’s completely changed, I am talking about chatbots, and because it was so innovative and so hyped and now on the completely different side of the spectrum can you say to me, because it is innovation and we are talking here about innovations but it is in a problem now because a lot of things. I wanna hear from your side and your perspective why it’s that, what happened with chatbots?

Milos: Very interesting story. We entered with chatbots because we believed in behavioral changing solutions. I would say that chatbot messaging is like one kind of extension of our lives. That’s how it started. I can easily message, I can talk with someone, I talk in person I can talk on the phone… And there were platforms that really evolved into okay let’s automate some of these discussions and let’s help make applications on this platform. And it was cool, but chatbots there are like so big expectations out of them, because everybody came in okay we are going to make AI and everything will work, it will learn for every topic possible. I have to say we have a really good domain-specific automated conversation chatbot solution for instant conferencing and activities around it, but it really works because you understand the model, you can easily say find me talks about microservices on Friday afternoon and it will pop up the right solution but then you ask them about some movie it’s unrealistic to expect that you can continue the conversation but people really kind, because of all hype wanted that, and then at some point even with large companies and vendors they were saying okay but there is no good implementation of that, and kind chatbots were like okay this is the thing that doesn’t work most of the times and again we need to be redirected to our support or something.

Kind became the bad word but there is like the different side of story, the biggest platform for that is Facebook messenger kind had his own privacy challenges issues, they were cutting out, they were changing their APIs and then that really lead people out of it, there is no enough development, more education people how to access these chatbots, how to access this conversational interfaces so it became something that it’s not invested anymore. There are still good, I mean it’s a good interface. It is something that you have in your phone, it’s not something that you have to learn, like I’m talking with you instead of it I pull up some business and say okay with the hotel, when it’s check-in, oh perfect, can I check in now, yes, okay, how to do it, click this link, because you can do it, reach messages in this scenario. We still propagate it, there is something with voice interfaces coming in, but still I think it didn’t achieve the hype, it was presented like a few years back.

N: So yes, chatbots were for a while hyped, and have been perceived as a future but as we see it now, because of those reasons that you told me, it’s a question mark, is it going to be the future again. Because of that, I wanna go back to service business and go back to our main subject for today of innovation in product design. Can you see in what it’s going to involve in the future, from your perspective, from your experience? What we can expect from innovations in this area?

Milos: In general what I am very passionate about, kind content personalization, which is not just now content. Content personalization you kind of have today, what you search on Google, Youtube, whatever, kind it’s personalized based on your experience. I mean business, trying to do that. But I see more and more in the application space, these tools of tracking and analyzing and building user persona, like will evolve definitely will evolve. At some point it should become a commodity, more and more it will be accessed for people to build different even interfaces, you can think off, we are using the same application but the things that I see and things that you see are different. I mean, you do achieve that with different tools, permissions and stuff but that’s not it, you know, I may be a beginning user, I have a beginner-friendly interface, then I go to some advanced functionality as I explore that, my interface can change. Conversation interfaces are a good example, that’s one of the maybe failures, a lot of solutions that are out there were simple request-response, without a full context of me as a user. That was the problem. If I come to a conversational interface and ask how did you like the movie from yesterday, or something like that, if I don’t have context it would be okay what movie and then again questions.

So this personalization is, I think, a big thing. I mean you kind seen it, in every places people try to do it, even like automotive cars, you have this seat when you sit, okay now by the key it detects. That’s minimal. You think of it, maybe the whole dashboard, how it works, where are your steering wheel is, yeah that’s coming now, maybe the performance settings, how aggressive, all of the things that are possible even without electric cars. Things like that are very exciting in a way I think there is a great opportunity of having that contextual even service, that would just build out all of that. Kind I do things that are reserved for big guys but we will see how that will involve them.

N: What is your opinion about the process of itself? About the innovation process? What can be expected there?

Milos: I think that the first thing is that more people need to understand how innovations happen? That’s the first thing that starts with education. Right now I think that people are, especially using mostly digital solutions, but people are enforced and trained to use something because it’s made like that. And what needs to happen, okay, so how do I make things that people will really enjoy and be easy to use? I think that education needs to happen first for people and then the tools, okay so how to do, I mean again falls back to this, a contextual tracking system that we will let and let people try to use it and then based od that we have good learning and good ideas like what it can be offered. Everything, I have to say, starts with good understanding and good analytics from some activity that’s being taken. There are good companies that do that really well now, like social networks are good examples, Facebook, they literally know your opinion, they potentially can know when you will go to buy ice cream, so I don’t know, 5 p.m. at Thursday they can promote you that. And that’s what we want to bring into every solution, that level of understanding.