How Lucas leveraged strategic tools to create truly differentiated products
Lucas is the VP of Design at Roam Digital, a New-Zealand based digital consultancy that focuses on helping enterprise clients with innovation strategy and launching new digital businesses. We spoke with Lucas on how he leverages business tools such as the Strategy Canvas with his clients in order to create exceptional, digital-first products.
By Lucas Coelho, d.MBA alum
Many enterprise clients come to me and my digital agency, Roam, and approach me with a business challenge they’re facing. Usually, these clients’ initial understanding is that their challenge can be solved with a new product. Instead of delivering a digital app according to the client’s initial expectations, I work closely alongside these clients to find out what their unique value proposition is, zero in on key differentiators, and build a custom-made strategy for success that truly sets them apart from the rest of the competition.
“A lot of these big companies are not so experienced with products, so they tend to want to copy whatever someone else is doing instead of spending time thinking about the overall strategy. So we use quite a bit of the Strategy Canvas to facilitate those discussions.”
Instead of revealing what the client’s key differentiators are with the client as a passive recipient, the client is taken along the journey with me and my team, as they’re invited to collaborate and brainstorm--resulting in the client’s deep understanding of what they need to leverage in order to tackle their challenge.
For example, we recently worked with a large port to solve their unique business challenge. The process of berthing ships at a port, (berth is a nautical term for parking), is still an often completely analog process that involves experts calculating on pen and paper how the ship will be berthed. This could lead to potentially disastrous consequences due to human error, including oil spills. The client approached us seeking to reduce this risk and wanted to transform this analog process into a digital one. We worked together to create a digital platform that can learn from the data they’re collecting about the vessels coming through the port, allowing for greater transparency overall and enabling ship captains to anticipate in advance what their berthing process should safely be.
I always had the business strategy in the back of my head, but I never used it in a streamlined manner as part of our core processes. Then after the d.MBA, I was like the Blue Ocean Strategy is a great tool. I need to use this!
We were able to help the client by first gaining a deep understanding of what their current value proposition is, zeroed in on what factors to be eliminated, added, or tweaked, and then helped them gain a better understanding of what their business model is versus what it could be potentially.
“Initially, the client aimed to copy successful port solutions from Europe, but by leveraging strategic thinking, we were able to identify the most important trade-off decisions that in turn helped us develop a product that served and leveraged the client’s business model.”
For example, we decided to eliminate customization, which was a default option for alternative providers. The main player in the market was slow to deploy because it needed a lot of customization, which was pretty much sold as a service. We decided to have less customization at first and develop software where the customer could utilize our presets to customize the software. Also, to complement the above, we decided to go for the subscription model to decrease initial investments, perceived as an impediment for most ports.
This was all done in the format of a fun, visually-engaging workshop as the Strategy Canvas lends itself so nicely to conveying fresh ideas in a visual format. As it turns out, there are many other international ports with similar analog and business challenges, and many other ports have reached out to us at Roam seeking our advice.