Business Product: Whoever Does Not Respect the Penny is Not Worthy of the Dollar
Technology has fantastic potential to build services that people love. Ignorant technology ignores those potentials. As a designer who can code, I always found it puzzling that organisations throw a lot of money at technology but cannot identify the small, high-value wins. I remember around 2000 when clever, creative coding was standard and great products were quickly developed. Then, around 2005, companies explored creating better services and experiences, making the economy boom. Eighteen years ago, I created custom-built experiences for the Natural History Museum and Science Museum. It took me a month to make a travelling exhibition that could function with and without the Internet and detect the Internet or its absence by itself so it could travel to any country. Last year, I witnessed SAP as a global solution failing when deployed in scenarios with different internet availability levels, costing the company that tried to deploy the solution millions in re-doing the programme. We need to regain technology literacy within companies. I believe that outsourcing has failed. The easy gains are straightforward. Let’s not be ignorant about them.
The detail that triggered me to write this little thought is that most services, banking being the biggest culprit here, name every file you download the same. If I open and rename all files, I will have an idea. I am busy waiting to download statements or other data every month. It is, though, a symptom of a much bigger issue.
A slap a day keeps the doctor away!
Service Design and analytics have shown that with every click, you lose customers. You can see from click or page to page that, at times, 10% of customers drop off and do not complete a purchase or account activation. That is a significant and massive issue for companies because it means all these small things that hardly show up unless you look add up to 10%, 20%, 50% or more impact on your conversion and retention rate. It gets even more puzzling when you know these small things can be fixed in an hour.
Our file example takes a few lines of code. No extra features are needed; it could just neatly name the file.
COMPANY_WHATSINHERE_MONTH/WEEK/TYPE_ACCOUNTNAME_DATE_VERSION.PDF
E.g. Santander_statement_April2024_MarcusKirsch_011.PDF
Instead of: Santander_433483496318641893642198.PDF
How neat, right? From my experience, I like the brand more every time I see a file shaped like that. I will more likely forgive them when something else isn’t perfect. I won’t scream at the helpdesk person. The helpdesk person will continue after two weeks of customers yelling at them. I will trust future products more. I will be less likely to leave.
Now, consider that you have 50 of these small things. Trust me, every service I’ve looked at i my career can be improved with about 50 minor improvements that won’t cost the world but will be worth millions once implemented.
If addressed, you will retain customers and revenue, pay more to acquire new customers, hire more people for your helpdesk, spend more money on marketing, etc.
Compound interest is a severe aspect when creating digital services. You don’t just go to the gym once. Digital services are not the same as physical products. Where products only need market fit, services need customer fit. Products are expected to stay the same after coming off the factory belt. Services are expected to be tailored, as many aspects are known to be run by people who can adapt to the customer. Do a little every day, and you will have business for life. Do nothing, and the costs of running your business will exponentially increase. Let your teams greet the customers daily.
Get Marcus Kirsch’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
See my teams suffer!
The second truth a digital service like this reveals is that the company’s teams are unhappy.
In great companies, I have seen people spend 120% of their time outside office hours, and the right effort is recognised and celebrated. In toxic organisations, I have seen teams working with outdated data, e.g. one bank was using pre-COVID data for their digital service design. Others gave teams half the time to create a service without explaining the rush. Others expected one team to create three services in the time it takes to do one. Many did not have a transparent prioritisation model, making any request equally important.
This confuses and slows everything down. It also pushes teams away from bringing up valid value improvements because they cannot tell what has value and what hasn’t. Therefore, they will not verbalise issues, risks or value opportunities. This is why you can outsource your team, which is cheaper and only does exactly what you tell them to do. This is why your local teams that pay double the salary only bring the value that an outsourced team half the price delivers. You have capped and killed the extra value they could get. On average, that is about 70% of the salary value. Employees represent about 5 to 10 times the value of a good business.
Let’s say a salary is 50K. So you are getting about 25K of value from a diminished team member. Let’s say the team has five people. Now we are talking a value of 125K vs 2,500K. That’s a 2,000% difference. That also means a manager and leadership that doesn’t manage right does over 2 million in damages per team. I have seen operational ignorance costing companies more than 2 million per project. When the budget runs out they let the team go, but keep the manager. The team did everything they were told. The manager did not do his/her job right.
What to do
Just like the gym, many small things add up exponentially. Sports scientists say it is more effective to do 20 minutes of exercise every day rather than 2 hours twice a week, and it hurts your muscles so much that recovery prevents you from exercising.
Test the file feature or something similar. Ask the team. They will have something similar in mind.
The scope is simple:
- Something that can be done within 24 hrs to go live
- They need to be able to quote a customer insight or flaw mentioned by humans about the process that needs to be fixed.
- This then should be communicated and shared with other teams to see what works and what blockers usually come up and to discuss how to remove them.
It is the small things of value that we seem do not matter, but 100 of them will exponentially add up and tend to outperform bigger efforts in terms of value and lower risks.
On Monday, tell every team to do one and finish by the end of the week.
#lovetheproblemnotthesolution www.thewickedcompany.com
Listen to The Wicked Podcast on youtube and apple podcasts
