Gain Better User Adoption the Design Thinking Way

by Tullio Siragusa | Aug 22, 2022

Gain Better User Adoption the Design Thinking Way

People tend to resist change when change means altering or replacing existing norms of doing things. A new system might fail when users do not accept it even though the system might be effective. Adoption, or lack thereof dictates just how effective a new way of doing things is or isn’t. At the same time, an inefficient system might create value among users if users decide to adopt it. I think we can all agree that user adoption is the primary objective for all products.

User adoption is not something that evolves at a particular point of a product development life cycle. Instead, user adoption requires proper planning and implementation strategy when the product is just an idea. Various products around us have provided amazing user experiences that were useful and served customers effectively. However, they could not make the impact they were intended to make, and in the end failed. Companies should always consider the design of user adoption as a primary part of their entire product life cycle.

What Is User Adoption?

User adoption is a process through which new users become accustomed to products or services and become long-term users. In other terms, it is also known as onboarding. In this case, customers tend to leave using products or services and adopt the new products, if they get value out of it. As users become accustomed to new products because they are effective and are best suited to their needs and serve their purpose, that is when you have achieved user adoption.

What Is Design Thinking?

Design Thinking assists organizations in creating value for people. It aims to solve concrete problems that impact people and deliver solutions that align with people’s needs.

As designers unveil or identify issues, they can bring about innovative solutions. In addition, it enables designers to tackle problems that people find difficult to define or verbalize. Furthermore, Design Thinking assists organizations to lead with innovation.

For example, a human can’t imagine things that cannot be believed. Therefore, it creates difficulty for the designers to land on a solution that does not exist. Using an iterative approach more often leads to innovative solutions.

It makes any organization run more efficiently and faster because it focuses on creating prototypes and testing to check their effectiveness, after a lot of listening to people and defining the problems.

Design Thinking as a philosophy encourages experimentation before launching products in the market that ensures creating value for people. Multiple methodologies move forward the Design Thinking process. Design Thinking aims to gain a clear understanding of the issues before generating an idea. It involves an action-oriented process to collect data that enables the designers to understand issues deeply. The idea generation phase involves various possible solutions, then the designers start prototyping, gaining feedback, and ongoing iterations. All these step-by-step processes after idea generation eliminate bad design. The product or service design involves user input, thereby increasing the chance of user adoption when products are launched.

A deep and clear understanding helps idea generation and expands the chances of creating multiple solutions, which are then analyzed and selected for prototyping and customer feedback. The outcome is the result of prototype iteration and customer feedback. However, companies need to practice patience during the process to get to a proper solution.

Better Products for Better User Adoption

Design Thinking is a process through which companies can design better products to increase the user adoption rate. Better products bring in and retain customers. Thus, it can lead to better user adoption.

Designers can use the following process to gain better user adoption:

Seek Answers by Questioning

A mindset filled with curiosity is a must have in Design Thinking. It is curiosity that leads to asking more questions, conducting research, and seeking to dig deeper into the issues to find solutions. All these processes enable us to come up with a list of solutions and alternatives that can lead to various possibilities to solve the problem. When you surface a list of solutions, they might have a specific purpose to function and advantages to provide a solution. To apply Design Thinking, you must be patient enough to think critically and break down the problem to get a deeper understanding to find out the root cause of the problem that impacts people at an emotional level. As you learn that the emotional impact is, you can begin to seek to create the solution.

Understand the Customer

Design Thinking focuses on the qualitative process of study and then a quantitative approach. It is because Design Thinking is human-centric and looks forward to creating products and services involving people’s needs. When designers interact with clients, they have a chance to clarify their doubts by asking questions. This enables them to have a deep level of perception about the people’s issues, assumptions, desires, and experiences. You can then include the functions or things that fit the client’s use and check what items or functions can be added to the product. In the next stage, you can view the issue and generate ideas by being in their shoes for a moment.

Never be Satisfied

Iteration and feedback are the main part of Design Thinking. There is constant shift in customer’s problems since their desires and uses for commodities and services keep changing. Therefore, it is better not to assume that your understanding of them is enough. It is better to adopt a flexible and ever-changing mindset since, with Design Thinking, constantly questioning and learning about customers is a lifelong process. Adopting or internalizing this process will not only enable you to break down the issues easily and quickly but also enable you to create connections between various problems.

Know When to Switch Mindsets

Whatever the methodology of Design Thinking, it includes various stages of convergent and divergent thinking. Both processes are beneficial only when applied at the right time; otherwise, they can prove detrimental. For example, divergent thinking occurs when designers research ideas, issues or understanding. At this stage, allow yourselves to explore and note down everything and research various aspects, even if that might not be relevant after this stage. It is essential to keep yourself away from judging things during this phase since it might create a hindrance to your creativity.

In the next stage, converge by analyzing the conclusion of the previous phrase, consider the implication, assess limitations, and transform the ideas into essential concepts you can test after interacting with the customers.

Embrace Experimentation

Experimentation such as testing, prototyping, and iteration with the help of feedback is a big part of Design Thinking. Understanding solutions that works and does not work helps draw a line between a good and a bad design. In addition, involving customers in this phrase also ensures that you are doing everything right. It also ensures user adoption of the final product or services when launched successfully.

Recognizing the Impact Beforehand

It is equally important for designers to recognize the impact of launched products. Investing time to check and amend product and services is the key to launching a user-adopted product. For instance, when you have a major technology rollout, the users feel the impact and might have a major disruption. Likewise, users engaging in that technology will have an impact, and their productivity might decrease temporarily while investing time in learning the system. Therefore, designers must acknowledge and properly plan it as a part of the user adoption process.

Strategies to Gain User Adoption Using Design Thinking

Design thinking is a method to solve problems creatively by addressing the needs of people. However, implementing it is tricky. Mistakes in socializing, onboarding, and implementing can cause issues. Following are the strategies to implement design thinking for better user adoption:

Learn What Draws the Customer to your Product

You can put yourself into the customer’s shoes to learn why they prefer your products over other brands. Your sales team might clearly understand this since they are experts in addressing customer issues. You can discuss with them and conduct surveys with your clients to know your drawbacks and plus points. This way, you can implement Design Thinking into your organization to improve user adoption.

By interacting with your customers, you will know the common trends of your products, how the customers talk about them and how often they use them. This interaction will help you learn about your product’s value among the customers. Then while user adopt, you can introduce the parts that can be advantageous to them . This communication can provide your customers with a better experience with your products since you have created it to address their concerns.

Engage in Trial Periods

Trial periods have various customer benefits. Your users can introduce your interface and check if that fits them. However, free trial periods can be counter intuitive. So, you can introduce low-cost trials to help your customers learn about your products.

Customer Onboarding

Customer onboarding is essential for user adoption. You should ensure that your customer journey is seamless, leading to value delivery. It is the process that will want them to return to your products.

Conclusion

Implementing Design Thinking into developing an idea and designing a system, services, or products around it enables you to gain better user adoption. It is because Design Thinking focuses on addressing people’s issues and designing solutions around them. Design Thinking can also help designers become critical thinkers who can learn about customers at a deeper level and help know the issues to be addressed by the products. Employing Design Thinking to solve problems is more creative as well as effective than the traditional methods.

Blog Subscrition Here

Recession Proof Your Business the Design Thinking Way

by Tullio Siragusa | Aug 15, 2022

Recession Proof Your Business the Design Thinking Way

No matter the medium of transmission of the news, we know a recession could be imminent. We know that recessions are fearful and can be catastrophic to businesses and people.

Many people agree that there might be a significant economic downturn in trade and activity despite having high corporate profits. Various questions might ponder in the mind of business owners.

What can be done to prepare for a recession? What precautions should be taken to get prepared for it?

No matter what the questions, you can prepare yourselves ahead of time without disrupting the business.

Investing in anti-cyclical methods before times of crisis is key. However, the real question that arises is how can you keep yourself in a scenario where your business is not affected by the recession? Furthermore, how can you turn this major challenge into an opportunity to improve and grow.

In the present economic situation, when your business is surrounded by instability, pandemics, and disruption, planning to innovate business strategies or prepare for recessions is prudent and wise.

With some strategic Design Thinking methodologies, you can protect your business from falling apart and improve it so you can grow. Many companies have leap frogged ahead during down cycles because they planned not only how to survive, but more importantly on how to thrive.

What Is a Recession?

A recession is when less trade, lower business activity and unemployment create a prolonged and widespread economic downturn in the country. A recession occurs when a country has two consecutive quarters of an economic downturn that declines the GDP of a nation. Recessions generally reduce the economic output and demand of customers and increase unemployment. During this upheaval, customers limit their purchases and get limited nonessential services or products. It results in an economic downturn in various businesses.

However, recession-proof businesses are those businesses that are still performing well despite the economic contraction. Some are businesses providing everyday products, such as healthcare product suppliers, food companies and electric and gas utilities. People need these essential services and products during the good and bad times as well. These industries might not grow much faster but can outperform during recession times.

Recession-Proofing Business

As a business leader, big or small, you know when a recession is imminent, and once that happens, there isn’t much you can do but deal with it. You can just wait to mitigate the impact when the other one occurs in the future. You should always take precautions to recession-proof your business since it is crucial for success. You can plan better using Design Thinking methodologies that can assist in uncovering plans that better and more closely align with people’s needs, thus making your recession-proof.

What Is Design Thinking?

Design Thinking assists organizations in creating value for people. It aims to solve concrete problems that impact people and deliver solutions that align with people’s needs.

As designers unveil or identify issues, they can bring about innovative solutions. In addition, it enables designers to tackle problems that people find difficult to define or verbalize. Furthermore, Design Thinking assists organizations to lead with innovation.

For example, a human can’t imagine things that cannot be believed. Therefore, it creates difficulty for the designers to land on a solution that does not exist. Using an iterative approach more often leads to innovative solutions.

It makes any organization run more efficiently and faster because it focuses on creating prototypes and testing to check their effectiveness, after a lot of listening to people and defining the problems.

Design Thinking as a philosophy encourages experimentation before launching products in the market that ensures creating value for people. Multiple methodologies move forward the Design Thinking process.

Design Thinking aims to gain a clear understanding of the issues before generating an idea. It involves an action-oriented process to collect data that enables the designers to understand issues deeply.

The idea generation phase involves various possible solutions, then the designers start prototyping, gaining feedback, and ongoing iterations. All these step-by-step processes after idea generation eliminate bad design. The product or service design involves user input, thereby increasing the chance of user adoption when products are launched.

A deep and clear understanding helps idea generation and expands the chances of creating multiple solutions, which are then analyzed and selected for prototyping and customer feedback.

The outcome is the result of prototype iteration and customer feedback. However, companies need to practice patience during the process to get to a proper solution.

Process Of Design Thinking

Design Thinking solves people issues in a customer-centric way. It is deeply rooted in questioning, generating ideas, and developing the creation of innovation. Design Thinking questions the issues, assumptions, and implications before creating any product or service, reducing money and failure risks. Here are the stages of Design Thinking briefly described:

Empathize

Empathy is the first phase to successfully designing solutions. It depends on understanding people’s needs at a deeper level than just the transactional level, but at an emotional level. You focus on what problem you are trying to solve with the active input of customers which will assure your success.

To unveil new solutions, you must understand customer needs, limitations, and aspirations. To do this effectively you must elevate your view of customers, to people. No matter what business you are in, you are in the people-to-people business. By engaging with targeted customers, designers should gather real insights relevant to the problem that needs to be solved and align products and services to best solve them.

Define

This stage focuses on clarifying and defining the solution. You should consider the themes that have come to the surface, the barriers identified, if your team is going in the right direction or if you need to reassess your learnings. This brief created with focus and inspiration is crucial to unearth the best solution. When this step is practice with precision, you can move on to the next phase.

The most important way to recession-proof your business is to not assume you have solved the problem based on your own knowledge of your customer base, it must be informed by the people who will be involved. The customers, and the employees. That alignment is the secret sauce to recession proofing your business.

Ideate and Collaborate

In this stage, with the combined idea from the previous steps, it is time to start creating solutions. To fuel this phase, you can use tools such as landscaping, mind-mapping, brainstorming and post-it notes. Before developing solutions, you should also assess where the solution can land you and the longevity of the changes you see in the landscape. Be sure to spend plenty of time identifying your strengths, weakness, opportunities, and threats assessment to be confident about the viability of the solutions you are landing on.

Prototype

In this phase, you need to experiment with the created solutions. Consider iteration and prototyping to infuse life into your creation since it is crucial. In this step, try to highlight the remaining gaps from the lens of the stakeholders (customers, employees, partners) understanding. This step can be improvised, redesigned, or even rejected through a series of critiques and reviews. The key is to not push a fixed narrative, rather you want to take a mutable approach here, and remain flexible to learn, iterate, and adapt. There is no room for egos in this phase.

Test

After the development and prototyping, test it with your customers. Some businesses might have a tight budget, or their clients might be uncomfortable breaking free of traditional methods. Engage with your friendly contacts first. It is also essential to know if your customers are vested in the problems you are trying to solve.

You should ask questions that are solution-oriented like, “What are the problems you care about that can be solved with this solution?”, “How will the solution make a difference in your experience, and why does that matter to you?” or “What more can be included in the package to make it a better solution that best serves your needs?” When answered effectively, these questions can help you come up with more productive and on demand solutions.

Recession-Proof Using Design Thinking

Identification

You can get your team, employees, and customers together to understand the current processes, particularly to identify the jobs that need to be done and the needs and difficulties of customers. This step can assist in finding out different initiatives that can impact your business. It can improve your present operations that can enhance customer experience or bring new value into your line of products or services. The identified issues can be analyzed further to know if they can offer a positive impact, their feasibility, and the complexity of implementation.

Opportunity Mapping

You can use opportunity mapping in various ways while planning for a recession. Here are some examples:

New Models

You can view the recession period as an opportunity since many industries are retreating. So, you can take this time to expand your strategic business plans. Know that if the traditional mode of function ceases to serve people, then new systems or commodities have the chance to become relevant. You and your team can create an opportunity map to identify the needs of the suppliers, clients and customers and assess their area of importance that has emerged. Then, as other industries are retreating, you can find an opportunity to reframe and extend the traditional things into a new one relevant to the circumstance.

Mixed Scenarios

It is likely that when one business faces a recession, another might get an opportunity to soar to new heights. So, these mixed scenarios view it and create recession-prone business units that can be more impactful. Therefore, you can take the opportunity to map your experience and identify strong and weak points that you can act on when the situation emerges.

Cost Management & Efficiency Gains

Whether or not a recession occurs, cost management and efficiency gains are always on top of the business must do list. However, when a recession occurs, businesses would investigate short-term opportunities while keeping costs at a minimum. Therefore, create an opportunity map focused on the books and related cost improvement chances.

Fail to Plan Equates to Plan to Fail

Even though no planning is perfect, still being prepared for the various circumstances can let you have options available at that moment. For example, if you decide to plan when the recession occurs, it will be too late, and your industry might lose the opportunity for growth and expansion. With Design Thinking tools and systems, you can get hold of various directions and create an impact to survive, thrive, and strengthen your business.

Conclusion

Even during a recession, you can meet the needs of your customers and grow your business. Companies should seek to adopt Design Thinking that can increase exposure time with customers listening, talking, and taking feedback from them. Then incorporate customer feedback through the lens of Design Thinking and ingrain them in producing the right products or services. This process will save time and money and decrease recession induced risks since it will ensure that your products resonate with your customer’s needs no matter what’s going on with the economy.

Blog Subscrition Here

Turning Reverse Engineering of Business Goals into Strategies

by Tullio Siragusa | Aug 8, 2022

Turning Reverse Engineering of Business Goals into Strategies

A lot of learning can come from reverse-engineering many things. In business it can be a creative process on how to bring about new change, and innovation.

Tech Backstage interviewed Jason Jepson to learn more about reverse engineering. We talk about reverse-engineering outcomes into strategy, building and positioning for technology, and the ins and outs of storytelling.

The Tech Backstage Podcast is a live streamed video podcast that goes behind the scenes with today’s leaders of industry to learn what technologies are solving business problems, and how Design Thinking applied to the future of technology is impacting the world.

Reverse-Engineering

Reverse-engineering means dismantling an item to check its functioning system. This method is applied to examine and thoroughly understand it, particularly to enhance the item. We can reverse-engineer various things such as machines, software, different types of devices, and so on.

The reverse-engineering process is generally applied to software and hardware from older companies. It depends on the technology and what knowledge can be gained during reverse engineering.

The information or the knowledge can be used to do security analysis or to remodel unused items. In other terms, reverse engineering is gaining knowledge from a finished product.

So, be it an engineer or a business owner, everyone can reverse-engineer a business process by starting with the end goal while looking at the business.

Reverse-engineering can let us focus on the important aspect as an outcome instead of just focusing on easily measured things. Therefore, every organization can drive innovation from a blend of data, process, output, and outcomes.

With reverse engineering, outcome, output, process, and data are bound to walk backwards. It might be challenging, but it is a rebooting approach where the focus on the outcomes can be a win-win for all.

Business Reverse-Engineering

To get reverse engineering turned into a strategy, looking at a business is crucial. When we view it, it gives insight into its functions, data, the process of functions, estimation of its outcome, and input.

Jepson states that with an example by providing a difference between a 5000-dollar client and a 1000-dollar client. They have the same desires and wants. The difference is that one understands and knows what they are building for their company. They have insight into their goal. But the other client, without knowing the business, has a system that will not serve its company in the long run.

Without a proper strategy or reverse-engineering of the business as a whole, “pulling information or calling that insight is very difficult.”

It might take business owners “constantly wagging different battles,” but it is crucial to figure out how to remove them. Finding those pieces of information while viewing the business is crucial.

You need to have a strategy to move forward, but before you build the strategy, you must understand what you want to do. Then you can find out where the problems lie. Then, you need to sit down and think about the outcome and then work backwards.

For instance, Amazon uses reverse engineering. First, they target a result, then, they proceed to go ahead.

The Reverse-Engineering Process

Irrespective of the context, some fixed steps are common regarding reverse-engineering efforts. They are:

Extraction of Information: The business or any object to be reverse engineered is analyzed. The information about its process, functions or design is extracted to determine how all the pieces fit together. For example, in the case of software reverse engineering, engineers need to gather the source code or the design documents to examine. While for a business, the steps might be to check its outcome first, then determine the input, functions, and process.

Modeling: In this step, the information that has been collected is transformed into a conceptual model with all the pieces explaining its function to predict the outcome. This step aims to take data from the original to form a general model. This model can guide the designing of newer models or processes.

Review: In this step, the team can review the model and test using various circumstances to make sure it is a realistic abstraction. When the process is tested, the process or the model is ready to be implemented to reengineer the original item.

Conclusion

Reverse-engineering means trying to purposefully break things so that we can fix them before they break on their own. This is done so we can bring the best positive change and experience to people.

Jepson says we want to embrace technology in a way to create a healthy relationship with tech where people can feel good when make use of it. There is always a need to create something that complements people. These are the little things that make a big difference.

Check out the full interview below.

Blog Subscrition Here

The Hyper-personalization Data and Privacy Debate - Solved

by Tullio Siragusa | Aug 1, 2022

The Hyper-personalization Data and Privacy Debate - Solved

The Internet is an essential part of our life. We surf the internet throughout the day, looking for various products or services online.

Data is what we share with the websites we visit. But do we know what happens to our shared information or how our preferences pop as ads?

In this podcast recap blog post, we will discuss how websites store data, what goes on with the data that we share, and how we can have an option to control our data to have personalized experiences.

Recently caught up with Jacob Borgeson on the Tech Backstage Podcast.

The Tech Backstage Podcast is a live streamed video podcast that goes behind the scenes with today’s leaders of industry to learn what technologies are solving business problems, and how Design Thinking applied to the future of technology is impacting the world.

Tech Backstage interviewed Jacob Borgeson Director of Product Marketing at Wyng, to learn about data privacy, protection and hyper-personalization.

Product Marketing Versus Traditional Marketing

Product marketing is about bringing a product to market. You do this by deciding the product’s positioning and messaging, launching the product, and ensuring salespeople and customers understand it. Product marketing aims to drive demand and usage of the product.

Product teams provide customer feedback and marketing insights, and this helps marketing & sales teams with better positioning in the market. It is a key department to help organizations increase leads and sales.

Product marketing greatly relies on being the voice of the company to the market and the voice of the market to the company. Therefore, in product marketing, doing a lot of research and analysis and talking to customers is essential. All the information informs the company’s sales team on how to talk about the products and sell them.

Traditional marketing refers to any type of marketing that isn’t online. This means print, broadcast, direct mail, phone, and outdoor advertising like billboards. From newspapers to radio, this method of marketing helps reach targeted audiences.

Then there is digital marketing. The main difference between digital and traditional marketing is the medium through which an audience encounters a marketing message. While traditional marketing uses traditional media like magazines and newspapers, digital marketing uses digital media, such as social media or websites.

In modern times with the internet, ads can follow consumers and track what they do. This has been referred to as the surveillance economy. Marketing has become reliant on this never-ending loop of perpetually connected consumer data.

Today, product marketers use digital mediums more often due to the value they can derive from consumer data that is readily available online, however with more access to consumer data also comes challenges related to privacy

Transforming Data Privacy

Data is shared by people on the internet via many platforms, even if advantageous can sometimes be disadvantageous to many people since the data can be misused.

There is always an opportunity for marketers to build better experiences where they can dig into the roots of marketing by teaching people about the company’s value, while also respecting privacy. It can be done so that people have transparency, choice, and control over what happens to their data.

For instance, at Wyng, the team believes that people share data with companies or brands only when they perceive the products and services as bringing value to them. So, they focus on using and consuming data while protecting it and providing privacy.

Companies invest time and money to make assumptions based on people’s behavior, demographics, and what they search for or click on, whereas the brands can also question consumers about their likes, dislikes, or preferences.

People also should know how their data is being used. Wyng has an open data consumption policy within the company. Brands use the data to assume more about people’s preferences based on things they value, so when an ad pops up about what they are looking to purchase, people voluntarily will share their information.

Embrace Privacy

Wyng focuses on moving towards zero-party data. It is the data that people share intentionally on websites. First-party data is the data that websites observe, whereas third party data is the data that people get from various sources. However, zero party data is the only data that is voluntarily given and is considered the best because of the following reasons:

1. Understand Consumer’s Preferences: With this data, the clear intentions of people can be determined. It is because they tell their likes and preferences and making any assumptions on the company’s part is not required.

2. Can be Acted Instantly: Secondly, after knowing consumers’ preferences, companies can act instantly. Companies do not need to do any processing since they can just take the preferences and match them up to the right products or services.

We see Wyng trying to get brands to transition to zero-party data instead of traditional methods. They use tools designed to collect zero party data by offering people value in exchange for their preference information and then being able to, in an API-driven platform, plug that preference data into all other tools to drive better, relevant, and personalized experiences.

Zero Party Data

Zero-party data is the data that the consumers share voluntarily to websites or brands they visit such as personal context, their purchase intentions etc.

Zero-party data can assist in the journey of finding consumers their required products or services. With zero party data consumers get the right products easily.

For instance, when a consumer comes to a website and says that they require moisturizer for dry skin, the website will focus on showing all the testimonials for people using the products having dry skin, or it might take the consumer right to the products that deal with dry skin. With this implementation, they can have a narrower yet more personalized experience.

Wyng mainly focuses on e-commerce website to provide a better customer experience. Zero Party Data in the Wing platform is like a CRM or CDP that is constantly consumer driven since they provide insights voluntarily.

Conclusion

The most valuable thing that a marketing system can have, is relevant data that consumers share voluntarily to personalize their experiences.

Consumers’ data with zero-party data can be a value-added option where people willingly share their data and receive a narrow, personalized, and a better experience. Moreover, they can also opt-in and out according to their choice.

Marketing systems should offer value, and the interaction with consumers must be valued to build trust. The building of trust leads to engagement and purchases.

Check out the full interview below.

Blog Subscrition Here

Unlocking Innovation with Data, Creativity, and Automation

by Tullio Siragusa | Jul 25, 2022

Unlocking Innovation with Data, Creativity, and Automation

There are many different paths to achieving success. For some, it may be through hard work and determination, while others may find success through innovation with creativity, data, and automation.

No matter what your path is, it’s important to stay up to date on the latest trends and technologies to stay ahead of the competition. In this podcast recap blog post, we will discuss how innovation derived from creativity, data, and automation can lead to success.

Recently caught up with Alex on the Tech Backstage Podcast

The Tech Backstage Podcast is a live streamed video podcast that goes behind the scenes with today’s leaders of industry to learn what technologies are solving business problems, and how Design Thinking applied to the future of technology is impacting the world.

Tech Backstage interviewed Alex Garcia Gonzalez to learn more about his journey from adopting a dog, to building one of the biggest B2B pet care companies in Mexico.

We learned how Alex found it difficult to catch hold of better foods and treats for dogs, and how he began to dig into the pet care industries in Mexico. Alex was astonished to find that only a few industries offered innovation compared to the pet markets in the U.S.

The aim to improve and better the lives of pets lead Alex and his co-founders to launch a business to provide foods that were better for them. They started by selling brands of better foods and treats for pets through eCommerce platforms and tech tools.

The co-founders always looked forward to making a lovely and enjoyable customer journey for pet lovers and improving their pets’ quality of life.

The success of Alex’s company, Pet Markt Co, was a combination of creativity, data, and automation. Let’s look at the value of all three.

Creativity

To innovate, you must be creative. It’s that simple. Too often, people try to come up with new solutions by looking at things in a different way, when really, all they’re doing is rearranging the same information.

“To truly innovate, you need to look at problems from a fresh perspective and come up with creative solutions.”

To come up with new ideas and solve problems, you need to be creative. Many people think that creativity is a skill that you are born with, but this isn’t true. Anyone can learn to be creative if they put in the effort.

The first step to becoming more creative is to keep an open mind. Be receptive to new and different ideas, and don’t be afraid to try something new. It’s important to be flexible and adaptable in your thinking.

Five Steps to Becoming More Creative

Step One: Be Willing to Take Risks

The first step to becoming more creative is to be willing to take risks. This means being okay with making mistakes and not being afraid to try new things.

Step Two: Be Open to New Ideas

The second step is to be open to new ideas. This means being willing to listen to others and consider different perspectives. It also means being open to change and trying new things.

Step Three: Be Persistent

The third step is to be persistent. This means not giving up when things become difficult and continuing to strive towards your goals.

Step Four: Be Patient

The fourth step is to be patient. This means giving yourself time to experiment and not getting frustrated if things don’t work out immediately. Sit in the question long enough to let the answers emerge.

Step Five: Believe in Yourself

The fifth and final step is to believe in yourself. This means having confidence in your abilities and knowing that you can achieve anything you set your mind to.

Data

Data is the lifeblood of any business. It’s what drives decision-making and helps companies improve their products and services. In the world of b2b tech, data is even more important. That’s because it can be used to create innovative products that solve real-world problems for customers.

According to a study conducted by MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte, over 60% of executives say that data-driven decision-making is “critical” or “very important” to their success. However, only 24% of companies surveyed said they were very effective at turning data into insights. Clearly, there is room for improvement!

“By analyzing customer data and using it to drive product design and development, companies can create products that are in high demand and tailored specifically to their customers’ needs.”

A recent study by Forbes Insights found that data-driven innovation is the key to success for B2B tech companies. According to the report, 60% of respondents said that data was “critical” or “very important” to their innovation process. This should come as no surprise, given the amount of data that is available today.

The challenge for businesses is finding ways to make use of all this data to drive innovation.

By leveraging big data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI), coupled with strong creative thinking, businesses can gain powerful insights that help them improve operations, identify new market opportunities, and create better customer experiences.

We learned in the Tech Backstage podcast how Alex uses Google Data Studio, for example. Alex put all their ERP data into the Amazon warehouse, and from there, they pull out data using the google data studio.

First, they have their commercial forecast in terms of sales and strategies. Then, they compare themselves with how they do operations according to the plans in a day or week to check if their status matches with what they had forecasted.

With it, they can predict units and money since they are essential dimensions in sales. They can also pull their financial data and compare their forecasted EBITDA with their real-time EBITDA monthly. They can also have all the primary sales data in the google data studio that integrates the sales happening on Amazon.

We also learned how they make sure to pursue marketing and advertising efforts to move the sellout to their retail partners. Secondly, using the Data Studio, they make more predictive analyses.

These tools and data help to forecast the trends to check what will happen if they move at this rate, if they require more stock, or if they need to inform their supplier ahead of time if it is required to make more products so that it will be easier to ship when the consumers order them. Thirdly, marketers also need tools for automating campaigns on Facebook and other platforms.

Alex states that feeding the tools with the correct data is required to make them better and more efficient. Therefore, the data studio has been a faster, more innovative means of productivity.

Automation

Automation is a huge part of tech and is ingrained in almost all modern companies’ development platforms. It is because it improves accuracy and safety, reduces waste and human error, and increases productivity and ease of scalability.

For instance, let us check how Pet Markt Co. integrated the automation process from the initial stage and how it developed into a full-fledged system on its own:

● Partner with third-party logistics: The company operated by partnering with third-party logistics in Mexico. The third-party provided ready systems to operate the company’s inventory and pick orders.

● Build your own systems: Next, the company built their own warehouse to identify what orders had been ordered by customers and how fast they were delivered. The visibility and integration were successfully set up with their ERP. All the orders, deliveries, and other data went through the ERP into the google cloud database depending on the level of integration.

They were quickly notified to the slack channels about the orders if the orders were shipped, packed, or had been delivered. It did not require any reporting about the happenings in the industry.

● B2B Automation: The company also has automation in terms of marketing. For instance, when customers order products, they make sure it is validated after the account is successfully created in the e-commerce platform and mapped to HubSpot which inputs the information into their ERP.

Automation process can positively impact a business while also coming packed with various complexity, but the business will surely soar with such successful business strategies.

Pet Markt Co. is an inspiration for how it was initially founded and how it developed its business system with the help of tech tool. It challenges other companies by making better market products and helps pet parents provide their furry companions with a quality life with better foods and treats.

Conclusion

To innovate at a higher level, you need creativity and data. Many people think that creativity and data are two separate things, but the truth is that they go hand in hand. To solve problems and come up with new ideas, you need to be creative.

To determine whether those ideas are good ones, you need data. After you’ve unlocked innovation, having automation in place will help you scale it in a sustainable way.

The key to innovation is combining creativity and data to come up with the best possible solutions, and finally using automation to streamline operations at scale.

Check out the full interview below.

Blog Subscrition Here

Engineering the Future from Astronomy to Augmented Reality

by Tullio Siragusa | Jul 18, 2022

Engineering the Future from Astronomy to Augmented Reality

When you have a vision of a mission in mind, you can explore a range of possibilities to achieve it. You can dive deep into a sea of subjects even if it is a long journey ahead. Jason Lozo exemplifies such an innate interest in exploration.

Recently caught up with Jason on the Tech Backstage Podcast

The Tech Backstage Podcast is a live streamed video podcast that goes behind the scenes with today’s leaders of industry to learn what technologies are solving business problems, and how Design Thinking applied to the future of technology is impacting the world.

Tech Backstage interviewed Jason Lozo to learn more about his journey from being an astronomer to an optomechanical engineer at Microsoft HoloLens.

We learned that Lozo’s eternal itch to do something better in life ran through his veins.

He gravitated into astronomy after completing high school, graduating from the University of Washington, and completing an M.S in Mechanical Engineering, then accepting a Research position at the University.

Currently, Jason is a Senior Photomechanical Engineer at Microsoft in Seattle, WA.

Optomechanical Engineering

An optomechanical engineer designs and develops optomechanical devices and systems. They also create and develop components like optical mounts and optical mirrors.

Engineers combine optical and mechanical engineering while designing these systems or devices. They research, analyze, and test systems or machines and supervise research.

Optomechanical engineers deal with glass, and many more optics are involved at the core. These engineers consider how to design things right for manufacturing and what materials should be used. They also take designs from optical engineers.

For example, optical engineers use ethereal lens design and pack them to protect and convert them into reality. In simple terms, these engineers take the optical theory into use to convert them into physical and practical objects.

The work they do also involves high-level modeling to create these optics. They invest much time in calculating objects’ design, like what happens if the lens is moved by 15 microns in a direction or if the lens’ curvature is a bit wrong.

They also calculate what might happen if you apply force to the housing, and if the lens is deflected in one direction, will it make a difference in the optical performance.

These are the kinds of simulation that goes into the making these devices, so they require high-level design and prototype modeling, involve a lot of simulation and front-end work that goes into building useful devices.

Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality is an interactive simulated experience of real-world environments. A computer-generated perceptual information enhances the objects that reside in the real world.

In the future, augmented reality devices will potentially notify you where the devices should go on your face. In the future AR devices can be your smartphone, but on the face. There will be a possibility of getting directions immediately, as an example.

Recently, Google tested an application where people can translate languages instantaneously. For instance, when you read a sign or somebody speaks in a language you do not understand, the device can automatically translate it into a language that is understandable.

Furthermore, the industry aims to create a socially acceptable pair of glasses with an augmented reality device. Companies like Facebook partnered with Ray Ban, where they built cameras in the glasses to help document the activities of daily life. It has also been predicted that people will see a huge application boom since engineers are driving towards it. It is already seen in games, for example.

The Role of Optomechanical Engineering and Augmented Reality

As an optomechanical engineer, Jason Lozo has described the actual mechanics of the devices he creates. First, there is a tiny projector in the arm of the glasses that projects light into the glass plate that relays the light directly into your eyes.

It is like having a film projector on the glass surface. It’s kind of like software magic. Next, Lozo creates holograms and locks them to the physical world through cameras. It is like a sci-fi object you can walk around with and touch or move.

Privacy Laws and Security

There is a role of social acceptability that has not been determined yet and cannot be defined at this moment, as it relates to privacy laws and augmented reality. In the upcoming generation of devices, there will be more manufacturers to define privacy policies.

For instance, the iPhone is believed to be more secure than an Android. Similarly, there will be privacy and security laws and workable policies, and varying policies will come up based on the companies.

Augmented reality and virtual reality are new technologies with which people have been creating video games for decades. Augmented reality devices, in the future will need to be developed in an ethical way that does not violate people’s privacy.

Conclusion

Augmented reality merges digital components into people’s perception of reality. It also raises the question of ethics since augmented reality works from confidential information.

Working on how a policy that is socially acceptable is essential. Any inventions or technology should be applied to an object ethically that does not infringe on people’s privacy.

Over time, we might see more devices that enhance how we interact with reality bringing astronomy level curiosity to the masses.

Check out the full interview by clicking below.

Blog Subscrition Here

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Archives

Categories

Meta

Pin It on Pinterest