Reinventing the Product

Any business eager to grow in today’s marketplace must heed certain digital imperatives.

Let’s say you want to hang up a piece of art in your living room. You could buy a drill and all the materials to do it yourself. If you’re handy, that might be the way to go. But it could also be time consuming and expensive. A better alternative might be to hire a company that already has all the materials and promises to hang your new painting quickly and perfectly. These types of companies represent the future. Rather than selling products, they sell outcomes.

This move from selling products, like hammer and nails, to selling services and outcomes, hasn’t been easy for many legacy businesses used to doing things as they’ve always been done. These businesses need to consider certain digital imperatives if they’re to experience growth and prosperity in the years ahead.

The first of these imperatives is the need to transform the core of your company to match the digital era. From engineering and production, all the way to sales and support functions, your company’s many facets need to be digitally connected with each other – and with customer feedback – every step of the way.

This includes having a digital-ready workforce that’s ready, willing, and able to be fast and flexible. Today, prototypes can be quickly tested with software designed to identify problems before they happen. Getting a product from idea to the marketplace is quicker than ever before. And once a product is in customers’ hands, it’s not uncommon for software updates to start going out the very next day. Your workforce needs to be able to work in harmony with this kind of constantly-evolving ecosystem.

In the same vein, your company needs to be aligned with the outcome economy, and move away from being product- and point-of-sale-minded. Your entire business model should be focused on creating experiences and nurturing long-term customer relationships, rather than looking at the point of sale as the end goal.

This also means making sure your company is managed with the understanding that multiple pivots may be required to stay afloat. If changes need to be made, your company needs to be built in a way to make them quickly and smoothly.