Where do solutions come from - our first release

In previous posts I wrote about an initiative we are working on to change the way we engage with our users. Our first release toward this goal is planned for the end of this month and the team has made great progress and will achieve our release goals. Our goal for this release is to begin seeding a virtual community space (a simple blog for now) with content to help people visualize what the community can be. Our thinking is that if the content is compelling people will begin gravitating to it. When this happens we can have a set of people that feel strongly about the content and the forming community that we can then work with to help determine how best to evolve the platform to meet the communities needs. As we provide better tools we hope to have the community take over and move forward on their own. Once the community takes over, openly discussing how they work and sharing ideas with each other, we can hopefully learn more about what truly matters to them and find new and better ways that IT can impact the way they work.

Where do solutions come from?

I am working on an initiative that is looking to improve the way we engage with our key, front line users when developing IT solutions. Our key user base is highly mobile, global and has very little discretionary time. To be effective and widely adopted, the solutions we deliver need to have clear value propositions, need to be easy to use and generally not require big behavioral changes. Given the complexity created by all of these factors I think we have done a good job in identifying value add solutions that can help these users be more effective and efficient. With that being said, I do believe that there are opportunities out there that remain untapped. The reason being, in my opinion, is due to the way we engage with these key users: typically somebody has an idea for something that might be a good product and then we follow it up with a period of user research validating how that idea could be implemented. I think this approach works but we can improve on it by finding new, different and better ways to source the initial solution ideas. The way we are trying to do this is by listening to our users. Not by asking them questions about a specific product idea but by listening to them talking to each other, sharing ideas, tips and tricks and advice and asking questions of each other. From this we hope to get insight into how they work and the types of issues they face and put ourselves in a position to identify simple solutions that have the potential to help these users. Success is an active community of users openly discussing the things that they do on a daily basis and the tools and techniques they use. With this dialog should come valuable insight into how our users work and what helps and hinders them. Its exciting stuff and has the potential to provide us with a wealth of knowledge that will hopefully lead to greater value for our users. Needless to say I am excited by the challenge and look forward to blogging about what we're learning and the progress we are making. Any feedback would be great....just leave a comment.