Creating purposeful digital products as a deliberate aim and intent
Working as an advisor and hands-on digital delivery consultant, I help ambitious product owners create and launch purposeful products. In practice, this means getting embedded really closely with clients and helping them adopting a product mindset to originate and validate product ideas, using lean experiments and an iterative agile approach.
I’m often asked for a straightforward overview of exactly what this means. Understanding what and how is an essential aspect of working efficiently towards stated outcomes, and helps us remain transparent and continually develop our shared practices and processes. However, why we do it is an equally important question, and this is where ‘purposeful’ becomes so powerful as a deliberate aim and intent.
What do I mean with ‘purposeful’?
Working in partnership with organisations to create and bring their next flagship products to market, a primary consideration is the business aspects of the delivery. Here ‘purposeful’ means that we’re continually learning about the opportunity and potential. An example could be to generate a specific market outcome, to optimise a metric, to improve an aspect of the product experience, or any similar goal.
We also have to consider the consumer side. What is it that we’re trying to achieve for the end-user? Seen through this lens, the actual value of our work is often created by understanding the desired outcomes of the end users and helping them achieve those things plain and simple. Solving a problem or simplifying a process for the end user in this way becomes the purpose of the product itself.
Finally, the work also needs to be purposeful in the broader sense to us as creators. Does the work create actual value for the intended audience or are we just creating more noise in an already saturated space? Will we feel proud to have been part of bringing this product to market? What about our personal development and careers? We create better work if we feel that what we do has importance.
Our innovation model for purposeful products
Although our product innovation method can be considered process driven, there isn’t a fixed formula for how to engage clients and deliver work; every opportunity is different and must be treated as such. The flow of the work should instead follow an empirical and agile approach where evidence-based research leads to innovation.
The best way to achieve ‘purpose’ is by adopting a product mindset based on continuous learning and understanding to deliver truly meaningful outcomes over time.
The best propositions in this area revolve around two interconnected core offerings: generation and rapid validation of ideas, leading to iterative agile product development and delivery.
→ Rapid validation
Rapid validation is a simple set of lean principles for maximising value and reducing waste by starting small and not overcommitting early in the process. As a focused methodology, the first use of rapid validation in product innovation is to answer the question “How can we address this opportunity in a purposeful way?” Secondly, try to answer the question “What could a purposeful solution look like?” When using the term ‘lean’ in this context, I’m not so much describing ‘Kaizen’ and a culture within the organisation of continuous improvement (although you should strive for that as well!), instead I’m describing something more akin to the principles of the lean startup methodology by Eric Ries. Personally, I see rapid validation as a principled approach to new product development and invaluable as a process for purposeful product innovation. This approach also helps you safeguard against unintended negative consequences which, historically, humans seem to have a real problem with.
→ Agile delivery
‘Agile delivery’ is what I call the iterative approach to the continued development of a product that’s been validated as something you wish to pursue further. In line with the principles of the ‘Agile Manifesto’, the highest priority at this point should be to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. The agile principles guide a lot of the thinking and ways of working, but from a product point of view, the key learning is that as long as there is a case for continued use of the product there is a case to continuously improve it over time as well. This is where agile product development becomes a critical contributor to the success and ability to create genuinely purposeful products.
How I use agile to create purposeful products
- I help teams embrace uncertainty and change
A lean approach to product development means that we should be mindful of how we spend our time and effort. It’s crucial that you don’t overcommit and wander too far into the cone of uncertainty on bets you know very little about. Uncertainty and change provide the opportunity to learn how to serve the users of the product better. But it requires awareness and an ability to respond to new knowledge at short notice. Those in the know, plan for change and build it into their process as a competitive advantage. - I help teams complete work in value-driven short cycles
Value-driven means what we build actually delivers value to our customers or users. This requires a need to measure and to validate what we release. The shorter we can make the release-cycle the faster we can unlock the value created. Here, the flow of value to the customers and reducing the cost of delay is the most important measure of ‘productivity’. - I help teams learn through continuous discovery
Every product created is initially based on assumptions. We are not all-knowing. Furthermore, information that was true yesterday may today be false due to changing market environments and consumer expectations. Learning through discovery is about taking advantage of the short cycled delivery as an opportunity to understand how users and consumers respond to what we’ve created. - I help teams see every iteration as an opportunity for improvement
By embracing uncertainty and by accepting that the need to improve is constant, we become brave enough to release something we feel uncertain about. Releasing early and often provides the opportunity to learn, which, in turn, allows the creation of a more purposeful product over time.
Key takeaways for purposeful product development
All of the statements above are connected and highlight different parts of the same agile product mindset that I see as integral to our product innovation process. Change will happen, and knowing so, we build ‘responding to change’ into our process as a natural element. By releasing work often, you can respond more quickly to that change, which also provides us with the opportunity to take measure and do small course corrections along the way. In addition, releasing work often helps us deliver value more frequently and reduce the cost of delay as we’re not holding back completed updates.
Being agile to me means being able. Able to identify opportunities and originate ideas, able to hypothesise and validate to learn, and able to transfer that knowledge into continuous and ongoing improvement.
‘Purpose’ is a word that can mean many things depending on who you ask. I like to use it in the context of product development to describe a deliberate aim and intent to deliver the most purposeful work you possibly can; purposeful for your business partners, purposeful for the end-users of the products created, and purposeful for everyone involved in the creation itself.
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Fredrik Delin is a product delivery specialist and Transformation Director at Cognizant, where he is helping leading global organisations design, develop and launch more purposeful and effective digital products and services.
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