Here are 12 tips to inspire business leaders and product owners and help you stay resilient heading into the next year.
In 2022, the world saw supply chain disruptions, hybrid workforce changes, economic uncertainty, the surge of the Omicron variant, and so much more. While we anticipate a lot in 2023, the only thing certain is change, and adaptability is key.
Tip #1: Understand your users inside and out
Knowing what drives your customers is the best way to ensure your product is successful. Conducting user research, analyzing your data, and assessing what’s already in the market can help you better understand what your users are up against.
One way to do this is to think about the parallel experiences that your customers may have in other industries. At Nerdery’s Women in Healthcare Tech panel discussion, a speaker provided an example of how a spa appointment tool could also be useful for patient scheduling at a health clinic. Eventually, once consumers experience the convenience of these tools in one industry, they begin to desire and EXPECT the same intuitive digital experiences in every other industry.
Tip #2: Be flexible with your product development approach
Creating a successful product is like trying to hit a moving target. Why try to predict what’s going to happen years from now? If industry changes, customer preferences shift, or global events outside your control occur, you may be in too deep to move in a different direction. Instead, your product approach needs to be quick and flexible. Try building products in smaller releases and collecting feedback with each release to ensure you’re building something adaptable.
Tip #3: Get creative when gaining buy-in from your stakeholders
Most product owners know that ensuring the product meets their clients’ goals and their customers’ needs is crucial. When you get everyone on board with a new product idea, true innovation can ignite.
At Nerdery’s “Sparking Innovation” event, industry experts shared creative ways to sell an innovative idea. Get caught up on everything you may have missed from the event.
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Tip #4: Focus on “speed of learning”
For companies to compete in the digital economy, speed to market can make all the difference. The faster you can adapt to what you learn, the faster you’ll see a return on your investment. The competition will always be nipping at your tail (or already one step ahead).
Tip #5: Don't be afraid of risky ideas
During the ideation phase, don’t write off every ambitious product idea immediately. Get every idea – good and bad – out on the table for your team to consider. Those big ideas could lead to actionable solutions. See if your big ideas have legs by connecting with our product innovation experts.
Tip #6: Your product strategy should act as a north star
A sound product strategy can help you determine the first step of the product journey and help your team stay in sync. Research and insights from data will act as your strategy’s core foundation, helping you better understand and meet your users’ needs.
Tip #7: Your product's design should be rooted in empathy
Having empathy in UX design means setting aside your assumptions to understand your users’ emotions, motivations, and what keeps them up at night. That’s why design goes so much deeper than just “shiny” features. Besides being frictionless, accessible, and intuitive, your product must solve your users’ everyday needs. Successful digital products are built and designed for what you need today and can be adapted based on your needs in the future. Learn more about Nerdery’s design approach.
Tip #8: Use data when making decisions
By 2025, the amount of data we produce is expected to double to 181 zettabytes. But what does this mean for businesses? There will be even more opportunities to harness real-time data, market insights and user patterns that are the key to creating better products that delight your customers.
But data goes further than simply being useful in building quality digital products. All roles – finance, operations, marketing, administration – have a part to play in making decisions based on proven insights. With the right analytics tools and governance processes in place, data can help you reduce costs, maximize resources, improve operational visibility, and boost customer retention.
Tip #9: Ensure your content is accessible to everyone
Ensuring your digital presence is accessible can help strengthen customer loyalty. In fact, when you invest in accessibility, your customer satisfaction can increase by up to 95%, and retention can increase by five percent.
Accessibility in action
Read how a frozen food delivery company made grocery delivery accessible to everyone.
Tip #10: Rethink how you define business value
In 2023, resolve to stop defining success as whether or not a box was checked. Measuring success by how many lines of code were written does not fully express the impact on business and users. Organizational value needs to come directly from consumer value. If you make your customers happy, the bottom line will follow.
Tip #11: Lean on team collaboration
Great products aren’t created in a vacuum. Bringing all the right voices earlier into the development cycle (and throughout each development phase) can open the door to new ideas and improved efficiency. When all teams – product, design and engineering – are encouraged to share their knowledge and address solutions together, issues are caught sooner, work is less duplicative, and the best products possible get into the hands of your users faster.
In fact, one of the strongest alliances can be bridged between UX design and data science teams. Here’s how to the two can pair to create a product experience.
Tip #12: If you haven't already, it's time to adopt the product methodology
How the industry develops digital products has evolved. Organizations are switching to the “product methodology,” where products are delivered as part of quick, iterative releases to achieve business goals instead of the “project methodology,” where one release is delivered over months or years. Those rapid releases allow you to give your customers the essential features faster, collect feedback to inform future releases and increase your speed to value.
Discover the five reasons to switch from a project to a product methodology.
Want to outperform the competition in 2023?
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