As strategic product designers, we help organisations to (re)create visions, strategies and products.

Innovation and product creation processes (where ‘product’ relates to actual products, services, digital, physical or phygital experiences) are inherently difficult for a lot of companies. This usually results in products that cannot meet customer needs, long and time-consuming projects, or even budgetary graveyards.

We love creating products, experimenting and launching new things… but despair over the pain of products that should not or could not be. As a solution, we combined our expertise into a different approach: strategic product design.

In essence, strategic product design is the combination of product design, product strategy and strategic design. It’s strategic because we look at what is required to build successful products that allow organisations to lead the future.

Multi-layered approach to building future products 

 

 

A successful product is built on layers of good foundations. It lives within a clear future vision and is embedded in a clear and actionable strategy. As such, our approach helps organisations to design each and every layer: vision, strategy and/or products (separately or combined).

The advantages of this multi-layered approach? An organisation can immediately start today with realising and manifesting a future vision in an accelerated way, which saves time and costs. At the same time, an environment is created to ‘experiment’ with a portfolio of products without losing focus.

A strategic design approach allows organisations to eliminate the most critical assumptions that require validation before proceeding with the investment. This is a major save as the main risks are addressed as early as possible in the process. In other words, by the time investments are required, there is sufficient validation to proceed. Furthermore, a ‘failed product’ in the strategic design approach does not mean that the vision is invalidated (which is unfortunately often the case in other approaches).

The strategic product design process

Regardless of whether we are designing a new vision or helping to create a strategy/product, our strategic product design process follows a similar four-step pattern. The goal is for the process to not only enable the conceptualisation of new ideas but also make sure that these ideas become actionable and manifest themselves.

The process is built on four steps:

1.     Inspiration. This also includes research.

2.     Design. Where we ideate, prototype and validate ideas and solutions.

3.     Build. The solution is transformed into an actual working product.

4.     Grow. Launch and grow a product through the various stages of the product life cycle.

During every step of the process, we keep the three components to a product in mind: design (desirability), business (viability) and technology (feasibility). A product lives in an ecosystem, so it is important to remain mindful of these components. The success of a vision, strategy and product lies in the existing harmony between these three components.

Strategic product design combines product design, product strategy and strategic design to help organisations build successful products that lead the future. This multi-layered approach helps organisations save time and costs as it provides validation and allows them to start realising and manifesting a future vision today. The goal of the four-step process is to ensure that new ideas are conceptualized, become actionable and manifest themselves.