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Exit Strategies

June 17, 2007 By

Things stop working. Your TV for instance. That’s when we move on and buy a new one. Similarly in business, products/services stop working. Not everyone can be a Coca Cola, living off the success of a single, unchanged concept for decades.

Products/services come to an end for a multitude of reasons. Most common ones include:

  • Consumers don’t buy them anymore leading to losses
  • Margins have been cut due to competition
  • Companies divesting in a certain product/service
  • Substitute products/services have entered the market

Whatever the reason for the end of a product’s lifecycle is, have you thought ahead? Do you have in mind what to do once that moment comes?

Some questions to bear in mind are when considering future options are:

  • What would you want to do? Put motivation behind the direction you’d like to take.
  • What would your customers want you to do? Think about your target audience, your value proposition and your business model.
  • What can you do? Choose a direction that emphasizes your strengths and competences.

Think ahead. Stay ahead.

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Let Your Goal Be Your Pilot

September 17, 2006 By

Frequently, pilot projects are initiated to test new products/services. When the pilot is successful, companies prepare the product/service for wide-scale launch.

However, there are also instances where the product/service is killed after the pilot wasn’t successful.

Re-evaluate. Re-adjust. Re-think. Re-design. What went wrong to warrant a pilot failure? Was the concept thus flawed that an unsuccessful pilot could be predicted? Did the pilot produce new information about the product/service that was overlooked? Success can be unpredictable but shouldn’t be discarded after a setback. The pilot isn’t an end in itself. It’s merely another means to an end.

Let the end guide you.

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Good Design Is More Than Good Looks

July 16, 2006 By

Good design is often underrated or undervalued. People focus a lot on what something looks like and whether they consider it to be user-friendly.

However, user-friendliness is not the same as usability. Design encompasses so much more than aesthetics. Design sits at the core of everything: aesthetics, user-friendliness, usability, functionality, scalability, flexibility and level of standardization just to name a few criteria.

Of course there are factors that relate to the target audience and the market / industry, but good design is generally universal.

As a second measure of quality, try explaining the design over the phone to someone, preferably someone who’s from another country / lives under different cultural circumstances / has a different mother language, to test your design.

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