Discovery Accelerator
Often it makes sense to start with a clean slate. Resetting and looking at things from a fresh perspective can reveal new business opportunities and unmet customer needs that can diversify existing product portfolios or even spin up new verticals.
Product leaders often reach a point where there is a strong need to upgrade a legacy system. Modernizing the system can feel like a missed opportunity to completely rethink the entire application. A discovery accelerator can have a fresh look at existing assumptions and unlock new business potential. At the least, these exercises can embed innovative thinking and overcome status quo biases.
Method to Madness
Inspiration is all around us. Giving the license to think creatively without bounds will help us explore new user groups, technologies, competitors, and our environment will provide a line of sight into all the possibilities. Saying no to ideas will tell us exactly why we left them and stay ahead of the consequences.
Value-based selection
Creating guiding principles are key to exploratory activities. These principles will help us measure the alignment of an idea and pit them against each other. There are no bad ideas, but, there are ideas that will align more with the business than the others.
Power of diverse X-functional teams
Having different perspectives is the #1 ingredient to generating a variety of strong ideas. When an engineer, graphic designer, neuroscientist, biotechnologist, musician, or business major looks at the same information, they process it differently. Some of the biggest 21st-century inventions came from teaming up diagonally opposite skill sets together.
Decrease in cost YoY of testing new product concepts
Surge in M&A activities since COVID-19
Increase in startups during COVID
Increase in preference for contactless operations
Our process
Define boundaries
Decide how far out we want to explore in terms of demographics of research participants from exiting user base.
Co-create, collaborate, workshop
Speak with participants on wide range of topics and expand the problems that business could be solving.
Testing Top Two
Narrowing down from hundreds, to tens to top two can be a difficult exercise. In the end prototyping two unique concepts can help validate instincts and discover new possibilities.
Open-minded
Having no constraints is unsettling for most business leaders which also blindsides them to a goldmine of ideas that can generate new revenue streams
Calclutated risk
Entertaining new ideas does not have to always involve taking a leap of faith. Minimal investments with maximum customer feedback can remove some uncertainties
Learnings over failure
No one wants to prepare for a failure but learnings from a process to try something new often have exponential knowledge gains
Workshopping tools
Miro
MS PowerPoint
Zoom
