Overnight proposition development

Welcome to the latest edition of UnPhiltered, my monthly newsletter reporting on things I discover through client work and my network. There's no fixed topic, but I am mainly involved in growth projects in financial services, digital and data businesses.

A recent client project brought to life how quickly we are now able to develop and test new customer propositions. OK, it wasn't quite overnight (although I do find some of my best thinking happens while I'm asleep), but we managed to research customer needs, develop and launch a website, build a prototype app, and test both with customers within a few months - the time it used to take me to write a powerpoint deck and excel business model.

Breakout organic growth often requires reaching a new customer group or addressing existing customers in a new way. A successful established business is usually optimised for its existing business model and doesn’t always have the capabilities or mindset to look beyond that. Energetic development of new propositions can generate new paths for growth by quickly getting ideas in front of customers and seeing what works in the real world.

The starting point for my client was a blank canvas to create a new consumer proposition. Starting with a scan of existing industry research and knowledge, we quickly generated a range of ideas and put them in front of customers.

Through rapid iteration this generated a lead proposition, which came directly from customers’ needs expressed in research. We built a customer segmentation which helped to define and quantify the target customer. In parallel we built designs for a prototype app, and dummy websites, to see what would fly with customers in the real world.

Within a few months, we had high confidence in a new consumer proposition, expressed through creative communications, an app prototype, a well defined MVP product definition a development roadmap.

The new tools

A few things have matured in the last few years which speed things up, in particular post-pandemic. Technology has allowed us to slash the time it will take to put our ideas, products and propositions to potential customers, allowing us to build more certainty in less time.

1. AI-enabled research and idea-generation. Generative AI tools enable us to to summarise and interrogate existing research, speed up and stress test idea generation and assist with copywriting and image-generation to bring ideas alive more quickly.
2. Immediate customer feedback. Online focus groups and interviews save the time and cost of face-to-face facilities, so ideas can get in front of customers within days, speeding up the cycle of feedback and iteration. Post-pandemic researchers and customers are much more comfortable with online research, and new online research techniques blend qualitative and quantitative research or allow you to do “qual at scale”
3. Digital prototyping and testing. Digital design tools like Figma allow us to collaborate and iterate designs quickly, and translate them directly into working prototype apps and websites. Digital products can be rapidly expressed as websites and online ads allowing us to see within a few days what customers respond to in the real world.

Lessons learned

It's increasingly clear that the old ways of developing and trialling new ideas can be dramatically accelerated, and probably more importantly, the risk of failure reduced by increasing the certainty of customer adoption.

• Don’t think and speculate internally for too long before talking to customers. Internal brainstorming has its place, but shouldn't happen in isolation
• But do allow enough time to explore ideas with customers before settling on a preferred route
• Really listen to customers, don’t only listen for what you want to hear
• Bring a broad group of stakeholders on the journey. Involvement in the process builds belief
• Test, learn and iterate at low cost before investing heavily in marketing, product and technology