#018 - Cloudy with a Chance of SaaS
Balanced Breakthroughs, The Bain of Creating the New
Design December - Drifting into January as I didn’t get everything out that I wanted to.
I’ve written a bit about my Masters of Design Methods degree. My design school experience was not about art, colors, layouts, or fonts. Instead, it focused on Strategy, Innovation, and Leadership, along with many research models based on repeatable methods. Before I end Design December, I want to speak to two models that help to ensure the completeness of a vision. As technical leaders, it is so easy to forget that your creations need more than just technical acumen. They need to be complete and fully formed for the marketplace. Let’s explore the Balanced Breakthrough model of Feasible, Desirable, and Viable. This was created by Larry Keely and Doblin in the early 2000s and referenced in one of my favorite books on Design, “The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity”[1]. In a talk Larry Keely gave in April 2020 he added Sustainable. I have added Ethical and Inclusive to round out 6 key elements you should be thinking about when creating and innovating something new.
Feasible
First, we have entered an age in which nearly any technical idea is possible, save for some very compute-intensive problems around AI and ML, and those boundaries are slowly eroding as evidenced by ChatGPT. In many ways, at least online, the technical challenges of a decade or two ago are solved with a credit card and an account at AWS. The foundations for your project are available for free to anyone with an internet connection, from millions of open-source projects hosted on GitHub. The internet has enabled the sharing of ideas on a scale that is so enormous it’s tough to quantify, yet technical founders sometimes believe that creating the next technical innovation will lead to victory. However, because all of these software building blocks create a ton of homogeneity, your outcome without some other thinking injected into the equation, at best trends towards the average and mediocre. How can you overcome this technical bias? I’ll introduce 5 more parts of the Balanced Breakthrough model to give you a more robust and complete way to introduce, complete, and compete with your innovation.
Viable
Second, let’s explore the viability of your offering. At the end of the day, unless you are independently wealthy, or funded by a benevolent sponsor, your ideas need to make money in the marketplace. Like the use of hosting on AWS mentioned above, the ability to fund your idea via Kickstarter, advertising, micropayments, subscriptions, or patrons has never been easier. Collecting money with any of these models is the easy part. Finding that elusive product-market -fit, for an idea at the scale required to return the investment you and your sponsors have put into your idea, is the hard part. Finding something that is unique enough, differentiated in the marketplace, and isn’t just a derivative me too offering is the difference between winning and losing. Forgetting that the idea needs to make money to support its ongoing operations has sunk many SaaS offerings.
Desirable
Third, now that you have a technical and financial plan, ensuring that the users of your product are happy and will continue to do business with you is your next concern. If the offering does not have some compelling features that take it beyond what is already available in the marketplace, why are you bothering to create it? Finding Ethical, more on this in a bit, ways to be sticky with your users, and making sure they want to come back, will go a long way towards making sure your users are happy with their purchase. Having solid User Experience and ensuring the next best action and the experience is curated for them will ensure your users are happy. When you get this right, your existing customers will become your biggest cheerleaders for your offering, and you will know you have arrived.
Sustainable
Fourth, against the resources of the planet, is your offering being as light as it can be with the compute it requires? I have great challenges with Bitcoin and other proof-of-work algorithms that use the equivalent amount of power as some small nations in aggregate. Being as efficient with the code we deliver and ensuring we do not use more resources than required should be a requirement for anything that we ship. Continuing to watch and ensure systems are as efficient as possible, is on all of us as software creators and maintainers.
Ethical
Fifth, we are well aware of any number of scandals around the use of social media to sway the opinions of citizens or to not treat others with respect and dignity. While we can use software and many models and technology for behavior change, we must ensure that we do this ethically. Tricking people into buying something, promoting unsound or unscientific thinking, and creating an echo chamber are some of the worst aspects of technology, that we as leaders need to corral to ensure we are delivering our offerings in an ethical way. By leveraging the golden rule, of treating others as we want to be treated, we can mitigate many of the dangers possible via the unethical implementation of technology.
Inclusive
Sixth, our world is full of diversity. Humans come in all shapes and sizes, and have different education levels, different thoughts, and ideas, and different abilities and challenges. In other words, humans are super unique beings. Because your users are human, they will be super unique users. It’s important to take into account the breadth and diversity of your users so that they may all experience your offering in the way it’s intended. To only target our technical selves, is the quickest way to alienate vast quantities of those that can be helped by the technology that you are creating.
By using the Balanced Breakthrough model, and thinking about how to use the thoughts of Feasible, Viable, Desirable, Sustainable, Ethical, and Inclusive above, you will ensure your offerings are as complete as they can be in order to effectively compete in the marketplace, and ensure you continue to innovate and do what you do best as technical leaders.
Thank You
Jim ‘The Designatic’ Tyrrell
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum-Products/dp/0672326140