Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World

Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World

by Peter Merholz, Todd Wilkens, Brandon Schauer, David Verba
Released April 2008
Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
ISBN: 9780596553937

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Book description

To achieve success in today's ever-changing and unpredictable markets, competitive businesses need to rethink and reframe their strategies across the board. Instead of approaching new product development from the inside out, companies have to begin by looking at the process from the outside in, beginning with the customer experience. It's a new way of thinking-and working-that can transform companies struggling to adapt to today's environment into innovative, agile, and commercially successful organizations.

Companies must develop a new set of organizational competencies: qualitative customer research to better understand customer behaviors and motivations; an open design process to reframe possibilities and translate new ideas into great customer experiences; and agile technological implementation to quickly prototype ideas, getting them from the whiteboard out into the world where people can respond to them.

In Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World, Adaptive Path, a leading experience strategy and design company, demonstrates how successful businesses can-and should-use customer experiences to inform and shape the product development process, from start to finish.

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Table of contents

  1. Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World
    1. SPECIAL OFFER: Upgrade this ebook with O’Reilly
    2. Introduction
      1. Predicting the Future Has Never Been Easy
    3. 1. The Experience Is the Product
      1. You Press the Button, We Do the Rest
      2. Increasing the Importance of Design
        1. What Do We Mean by Design?
      3. Technology, Features, Experience
      4. The Experience Is the Product
    4. 2. Experience as Strategy
      1. Competitive Advantage: A Little History
      2. Escaping Parity
        1. Parity Isn't a Strategy
        2. Being the Best Isn't a Strategy
      3. The Escape of Novelty
        1. Novelty Isn't Differentiation
        2. Novelty Lacks Context
      4. Why Experience Matters
        1. Maintaining Experiential Focus
      5. An Experience Strategy Isn't a Brand Strategy
      6. Embodied Experience Strategy
      7. Creating Effective Experience Strategies
    5. 3. New Ways of Understanding People
      1. Empathy
      2. Old Models and Their Problems
        1. Consumers, Literally
        2. Sheep
        3. Homo Economicus
        4. The "Human Factor"
        5. Not All Wrong, Not Really Right
      3. What's Been Missing?
        1. Emotion
        2. Culture and Context
      4. A New Model
      5. Embracing Complexity
    6. 4. Capturing Complexity, Building Empathy
      1. Why Research Is Essential
      2. Capturing Complexity with Qualitative Research
        1. Using Ethnography as a Research Tool
      3. Where Organizations Go Wrong
        1. Research in Isolation
        2. Reports, Where Good Insights Go to Die
        3. Market Research versus Design Research
      4. Making Research an Organizational Competency
        1. Mix Methods
        2. Integrate Research with the Design Process
        3. Create Truly Useful Deliverables and Artifacts
        4. Make Prototypes
    7. 5. Stop Designing "Products"
      1. Doing It Right
        1. Maintaining Focus
      2. Doing It Wrong: A Classic Mistake
      3. Doing It Right Online
      4. When Services Behave Like Products
      5. Symphony or Cacophony?
      6. Don't Over-Engineer
      7. The System Is the Product
    8. 6. The Design Competency
      1. Obstacles to Adopting Experience Design
      2. Understanding and Affecting Experience
        1. Good Experiences Require Systemic Coordination
        2. The Trouble with New, Better, and Different
        3. What's Missing?
      3. About Design
        1. The Misconceptions of Design
        2. The Potential of Design
        3. Design Can't Do It Alone
      4. Design as an Organizational Competency
        1. Embedding Design in the Organization
        2. Building a Competitive Competency
      5. Advantages of a Design Competency
        1. In the Beginning
        2. Traditional Tools Can't Tame the Fuzz
        3. Great Execution Isn't the Answer
        4. Getting Started on the Best Path
        5. Flickr Framed
      6. The Idea Lab
        1. Ideas Are Neither Scarce Nor Fragile
        2. Ideas and Experience Made Manifest With Design
        3. The Power of Tangible Ideas
      7. Creating the Long "Wow!"
        1. Loyalty Can't Be Manufactured
        2. "Wow!" Engenders Loyalty
      8. Four Steps to Your Long "Wow!"
      9. Relinquishing Control
        1. Control Is Shortsighted
        2. Control Limits Growth
      10. DIY Design: The Customer as Designer
      11. Design Competency: A Strategic Advantage
    9. 7. The Agile Approach
      1. The Agile Manifesto
      2. Less than Agile: The Waterfall Approach
      3. The Emergence of Lean Manufacturing
      4. The Agile Approach
        1. Benefits of the Agile Approach
          1. Lower costs
          2. Less documentation
          3. Essential-Only Feature Sets
          4. Hitting the Sweet Spot—and the Window
      5. The Iterative Approach: A Little History
      6. How Companies Create Agile Environments
        1. 3M: Make a Little, Sell a Little
        2. Toyota: Fewer Engineers, Less Development Time
      7. The Shifting Landscape: Embedded and Networked Systems
      8. MIT's Fab Lab
      9. Overcoming Obstacles
        1. Create Opportunities
        2. Build Accurate Prototypes
        3. Make the Iterative Process Inexpensive and Easy
        4. Encourage Open Communication
      10. How to Get There
        1. Experiment, Experiment, Experiment
    10. 8. An Uncertain World
    11. Bibliography
      1. Books
      2. Films
      3. Interviews
      4. Journals and papers
      5. Magazines
      6. Newspapers
      7. Online references
      8. Presentations
    12. Index
    13. About the Authors
    14. SPECIAL OFFER: Upgrade this ebook with O’Reilly

Product information

  • Title: Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World
  • Author(s): Peter Merholz, Todd Wilkens, Brandon Schauer, David Verba
  • Release date: April 2008
  • Publisher(s): O'Reilly Media, Inc.
  • ISBN: 9780596553937