Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services
for an Uncertain World: Adaptive Path on Design
Reviewed by Robert Pritchett
Introduction
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.
This book is a rah-rah piece for Adaptive Path and how they
were able to help clients climb out of downward-spiraling vortexes and overhaul
business practices through focusing on customer satisfaction.
There are 8 chapters on the usual and hackneyed "best
practices" approach to saving companies from themselves; "Experience
is the Product, Experience as Strategy, New Ways of Understanding People,
Capturing Complexity, Building Empathy, Stop Designing Products, Design
Competency, the Agile Approach and An Uncertain World. Yes there is an
Bibliography and an Index.
Yes there are surprisingly quite a few examples of Apple
Corporation's goofs and what they did to overcome them. Ditto for Kodak, OXO
and yes, even a smattering of Microsoft. They went after the low-hanging fruit.
I think Microsoft has gone mental, myself, but hey, what do I know? I've only
successfully served customers and established good will for 30 some years.
Companies come and go. Relationships can last forever.
Conclusion
If you never, ever read a book about picking your failing
business back up by its bootstraps by using a service company that can do it
for you, then get this book. Otherwise, figure it out on your own. See, the
decision is still out on Microsoft as far as I'm concerned. They haven't made a
successful money-making product in years. Hey Microsoft, I know this company
that sells solutions named "Adaptivepath" who does business
consulting for a living…
