How are we helping customers solve their problems in their terms?

13 January 2017 / article

How do you assemble your customer solution? Does it solve customer problems whilst freeing them to pursue their preferences? Or does it lock them into one single rigid process?

Nespresso makes home coffee machines without profit, in order to sell coffee capsules very profitably over the Internet. iTunes makes little profit on selling you back the music after purchasing the rights, but apple then makes a huge margin on the iPod – which also enables you to listen to music downloaded by other means. Similarly the iPhone is a high margin standard product, but infinitely customizable with it’s open app platform.

We used to think about products as solving customers’ problems. One product would compete against another or against another way of doing the same thing. But as digitalization opened up the world of connectivity, increasingly products are part of platforms that help customers assemble their solution out of a wide choice of elements.

This means shifting perspective from:

traditional marketing: making our best effort to offer customers our best solution to their imagined problems (often leveraging the technologies we know)

to:

platform thinking: developing complementary products and services customers themselves will assemble according to their use and needs.

In product development terms, this is a radical shift as it means looking completely different both at how people assemble complements and choose competing solutions but also understanding where the profitability comes from – not all the elements will be profitable.

The platform revolution has been going on in product development without many product developers noticing or getting wise. Get with the program: join the revolution! Change your thinking about how to help customers solve their problems autonomously rather than try to impose your preferred solution.

Leading author, speaker and researcher, I work on both the "hard" (improve quality, reduce lead-time, eliminate waste) and "soft" (engage people in problem-solving and improvement to develop them to the fullest of their abilities) dimensions of Lean transformation.

I started studying improvement initiatives twenty years ago as part of my PhD. research on Mental Models. I was persuaded by Toyota engineers that to understand lean you had to practice it firsthand and I have been working with supervisors, site managers and now CEOs to leverage their lean efforts into market share, people engagement and bottom line results. You don't know what you don't know and the most surprising thing I've learned as a cognitive sociologist is the value of: see with your feet and think with your hands!

I co-founded the Projet Lean Entreprise and the Institut Lean France. I have written several books and articles about the links between knowledge and management (Managing With Systems Thinking, The Effective Organization, Les Modèles Mentaux), and more recently, co-authored three business novels published by the Lean Enterprise Institute, one about lean turnaround, The Gold Mine, one about lean transformation, The Lean Manager, and a novel about Lean practice, Lead with Respect as well as a Lean manual in French, Le Management Lean.