TwosWrite things down

Fit For Purpose by David Anderson and Alexei Zheglov

Fit For Purpose by David Anderson and Alexei Zheglov

by Parker · 76 things on Twos

How modern businesses find, satisfy, & keep customers
Chapter 1: The Best Taxi Service in the World
The London black taxi service wasn’t designed to be fit for purpose, but rather evolved over time to be that way.
Chapter 2: Justin Bieber versus the Storm King
Three components that contribute to every product or service: it’s design, it’s implementation, and it’s service delivery.
To understand what your customers expect back again and again, you need to understand where they choose your product or service. You need to understand the purpose – the customers “why.” What purpose were they fulfilling when they consumed your product or service?
Chapter 3: Man versus Machine
Before you can evaluate whether your products or services are fit-for-purpose, you need to be able to identify your customers purpose.
Two ways to learn your customers purpose:
Using humans and narrative
Using surveys and data
The front line, customer facing staff has the most valuable information their business needs for long-term survival—why their customers select them and what they hope to achieve with their product or service.
“Why did you choose our service? What was your reason or the purpose behind your selection?”
“Now, how well did our product or service fulfill your expectations given your specific reasons for selecting us?”
“Tell us why you gave the rating in the second question”
If a customer has an emotional attachment or loyalty to your brand, she may choose to wait in the hope that your product or service improves to an acceptable level rather than switch away to another brand.
Segment your customers based on their purpose—the “why” they select you.
Understanding your customers purpose, their “why”, segmenting your market hard on “why,” and building an understanding of the criteria customers use to select your product or service is a far better way to ensure satisfied customers, repeat business, and future recommendations.
Section 2: Understanding Fitness-for-Purpose
Chapter 4: On Base Percentage, the Boston Marathon, and the Car of Your Dreams
Chapter 5: The ExpandingUniverse
It’s the perceived transfer time that matter more than the absolute amount of time.
Chapter 6: From Valentine’s Day to Vertu
Four categories of commonly recurring selection criteria.
Lead time and it’s predictability
Time from accepting a customer order until delivery or time-to-market, the time from when we decided to do something until it was ready for launch.
Quality and it’s predictability
Functional: the “what”, specification accuracy.
Non-functional: “how well” the “what” is implemented.
For a social network, functional quality includes features to help you find and add friends, make posts visible to your friends, and see their reactions. The non-functional quality may be how many concurrent users it can support, whether the network is reliable 24/7, and so on.
A rolls Royce has high quality non-functionality: the substance, durability, finish, reliability, solidness, weight, and so on.
Safety or conformance to regulatory requirements
Customers adopt safety and regulatory requirements as fitness criteria when it affects their consumption of the product.
In regulated industries, meeting the regulations is table stakes for entering the game.
Price or affordability—although price may require some special treatment
What kind of customers would be attracted to your product or service at different price levels?
What would these customers purposes be for buying your product or service at these price levels?
What would your market segmentation picture look like at each price level?
What (non-functional) fitness criteria would matter to customers in each market segment at these price levels?
Chapter 7: We Know Why You Fly
If your free product is fit for purpose and your premium version is for another purpose, your strategy is flawed.
Treating different market segments differently can make your products and services fit-for-purpose while relieving staff from overburdening.
Ensure all three product or service components get equal attention: design, implementation, and service delivery.
In mobile apps, surveying users is still necessary to understand the customers why.
Do market segmentation based on customer's purpose, rather than by demographical categories.
Fitness criteria are the criteria the customer uses to select your product or service.
Section 3: Managing Fitness-for-Purpose
Chapter 8: Using Humans and Narrative
Chapter 9: Surveys and Data
Fit for purpose card questions:
Tell us why you chose our offering. Select up to three reasons or objectives you had when choosing it.
For each reason above, please indicate how fit for purpose you found our service in fulfilling your expectations.
Tell us why you gave the scores in question 2
Would you please fill out this small card? This will help us make our products better tuned to our customer's needs.
Chapter 10: It’s Not Luck
Section 4: Mind the Gap
Chapter 11: Blind Spots
Sell to the identity of the buyer.
Businesses need to get smarter at using technology to hold an unobtrusive conversation with their users, gradually building a picture of why they are selecting them and what their goals and objectives are for using the technology.
Chapter 12: “It’s Your Future, Be There”
Why did you choose our product or service over a rival?
Customer narratives are helpful. “What job were you trying to do [using our product or service]?”
Chapter 13: Von Moltke’s Balanced Scorecard
No product plan survives its first contact with customers or the competitive market.
“There are no facts inside your business, get out of it.” - Steve Blank
Chapter 14: “Be Paranoid”
“You can never be comfortable with your success, you’ve got to be paranoid you’re going to lose it.” - Lou Gerstner
Enthusiasts don’t mind bugs and want to feel a part of the community.
Early adopters want to belong to a social group, need strong functional quality, can live with some missing functionality and workarounds.
Early majority are not interested in social status among the user community, they follow a competitor or reference.
Late majority want low prices.
Laggards don’t want your product and don’t know why they need it.
Find new customers based on their needs, purposes, and goals.
Satisfy them by innovating and designing products and services that delight by being more fit-for-purpose.
Keep those customers coming back by showing that you are listening to their ongoing needs, opinions, and changing purposes.
“It works, just the way I need it to.”