Why is Product Thinking still the Prevalent thought?

Many of us believe that all we need to do is create better, more innovative products, the Apple mystic? The product continues to be the primary focus of business. Can we stay ahead of competition by products alone? Or even with products in general?

We have used Lean to make products that are easy to use, manufacture and make money with. Manufacturing is shrinking, and services have become the dominant force of business. Many companies are defined by their services, versus their product. There is a need for organizations to differentiate through service quality and customer experience. However, we still market services in much the same manner as we do products, through features and benefits.

We typically think of Service as a verb or an activity that is consumed by our customers. We think of Service in forms of organizational functions such as Engineering, Purchasing, Shipping, Marketing, Accounting, IT, Human Resources. When we set out to improve one of these functions, we look at how we do the work. We focus on our own activity.  The carryover of product thinking that better, faster, cheaper wins is a total misnomer. The focus on our own activity encourages internal thinking and misplaces our priorities. While addressing services from this viewpoint may seem to be productive and worthwhile, it misses the point in design. If we intend to make services profitable, we must accept that customers do not care how we do our work. They might not even care that we are incompetent at certain functions. Customers want us to provide a service to help them achieve a desired outcome. However, have we designed our services to demonstrate that value?

Shameless Plug: Lean Service Design Trilogy Workshop (Learn More) teaches us how to…

• Think of services as products or deliverables.
• Close the performance gap between customers and your organization.
• Create services that are countable, occur in discrete units and can be plural.
• Create services that can be part of a package.
• Create services that are not only supporting but also self-supporting. 
• Create services that can be cost leaders not cost losers.
• Create opportunities through services.
• Create revenue through services.

The workshop is based on this outline developed for the Lean Service Design Trilogy. We will use the Lean methods of SDCA, PDCA and EDCA as they relate to each discipline and the path between Service through SD-Logic (The Service-Dominant Logic of Marketing) to Design.

Sign up Now for Lean Service Design Trilogy Workshop

The above is an online workshop, if you would like information on the full day offline workshop, please contact me.