1210s Design

*** Launching: Unhappy Paths Workshop *** We're offering a new innovation workshop – to turn your worst case scenarios into your biggest growth opportunities, walking away with new offerings to drive growth and business cases for taking them forward. 🔥 The bigger the problem, the bigger the reward Over the past 15+ years I’ve seen first hand that businesses tend to focus on the happy paths or only scratch the surface on the unhappy paths. It is good practice to start with happy paths – they help us to work out what the ideal journey should look like and the rewards in return. But real life doesn’t stick to the happy paths – external factors, our state of mind, and the world we move through can nudge us onto the unhappy path. The real rewards are on the unhappy path – because when bad things happen it’s an opportunity for the business to step in as the hero. The trick is to find the worst case scenarios – then to turn these ‘hero opportunities’ into new offerings that can drive real growth. ❤️ Innovation workshop We turn your worst case scenarios into your biggest growth opportunities, walking away with new offerings and initial business cases to take forwards. The workshop is 4 hours, making it ideal for busy product, tech, sales, and marketing teams – it’s a super efficient use of your time, and high-impact. If this sounds interesting, just send us a message and let’s chat! https://lnkd.in/djGSnf4d #workshop #innovation #unhappypaths #happypaths #designthinking #design #servicedesign

We love unhappy paths – where everything can go wrong in a customer journey and you need to become the hero that saves the day. Our Design Director, James Bailey, did a piece of work at St.Pancras station that relates to this, looking at how time-pressured scenarios can impact customer journeys and decision making. Why? Because travellers face unhappy paths every day. If we can learn from them we can course correct bad journeys faster and improve experiences. So here’s a quick story about his piece of work – about the research experiment he ran – just to offer you some inspiration today. ⏰ “You have 1 hour!” James gave his participants a simple brief – you need to get to St.Pancras, buy your train ticket, some lunch, and a gift for your family, then get on your train. Then he threw in a curveball – you can get to the station any way you want, and buy things in any order, but you only have 1 hour! And the clock starts now!! This immediately created a sense of panic and stress, and put everyone in a time-pressured state of mind. It was great! How would their journeys play out? 📱 Mobile ethnography James wanted to capture live data on their journeys, but in practical terms he couldn’t shadow everyone at the same time. So he used a ‘mobile ethnographic’ approach. He pinned a mini camera onto each participant to passively capture their journey – to capture natural behaviours without any conscious action on their part. He also asked them to actively document key moments in their journey using an app – to provide a satisfaction score, attach a quick note, or a picture if it helped. We wish we could share specifics on the outputs and outcomes from his research! But they're owned by the client. We can say one thing though... ❤️ We love unhappy paths The depth of insights James gained into people’s behaviours and decision making led to some incredible opportunities to optimise products and services throughout the station. Plus, they led to truly innovative propositions that combined live data + situational awareness + personalisation + behavioural nudges. 🎯 Prioritise the unhappy paths! Observing real people in real contexts of use will deliver hugely valuable insights into their journeys and decision making. But if you go one step further, and purposely investigate unhappy paths, you will not believe the depth of insights you gain and the opportunities it leads to. It doesn’t need to be high-effort or expensive either, and the positive impact it will have on your design work and customer experiences is huge. And that’s the real endgame – the more value you deliver into customer lives, the more value your business gets in return. Prioritise those unhappy paths! P.S. We hit the word limit in this post, but there's more here: https://lnkd.in/dqEcmXTP #research #ethnography #servicedesign #innovation #unhappypaths #design #designthinking #iot #internetofthings #travel #stpancras #kingscross #servicedesigner

*** We're offering FREE ‘Hidden Risks’ workshops – know any startups who might be interested? *** Hidden risks are those big assumptions, gaps in thinking, and misalignments that will hurt your business as it grows – and there’s a whole spectrum of pain they can cause. Seemingly small risks that can be quantified in the £10,000s really start to add up. Potentially hurting the business to the tune of £100,000s or even £1,000,000s. 😬 On the lower end of the spectrum – it’s common to find wasted effort, where time, money, and other resources are spent without seeing the return; or unfortunate errors/re-dos caused by mistakes that could have been avoided. 😓 Moving up the spectrum – you start to see a negative impact on your top and bottom lines; you’re not getting the revenue you need for growth, and your costs to serve and other expenses are impacting profitability. 😰 Moving further up the spectrum – you start to see missed chances, where you didn’t capitalise on opportunities to push the growth needle; or missed targets, where the business isn’t delivering on its promise and your runway is running out. 😱 And in the worse case scenario – investors start to lose confidence, they’re more cautious and its harder to raise the funds you need to survive; and the business is heading towards the end of the its runway with an uncertain future. Hidden risks are the root cause for this spectrum of pain… ❤️ FREE Hidden Risks workshops We've designed workshops that will surface your hidden risks, then turn the biggest risks into your biggest growth opportunities: https://lnkd.in/eemQW7V2 If this sounds interesting, and you would like to learn more, just message us or email james@1210s.com. Let’s chat! #startups #ventures #seriesa #scaleups #investors #venturecapital #portfolio #risks #designthinking #workshops #product #productdesign #sales #marketing #technology

*** We're offering FREE ‘Hidden Risks’ workshops – know any startups who might be interested? *** 'Hidden risks' are those big assumptions, gaps in thinking, and misalignments that will hurt your business as it grows – the trick is to turn your biggest risks into your biggest growth opportunities. 💣 Hidden Risks: Between Teams Startups have great teams. But because they’re working at pace it’s hard bringing everyone together to consider all the inter-dependencies in their strategies and roadmaps. This creates hidden risks that can lead to tensions and serious growth issues. Do any of these ring a bell? 💰📱 Sales / Product Is our product roadmap aligned to our sales team and their target verticals and buyers? Is our sales strategy aligned to our real end-user needs and their product expectations? Does our product team have access to our buyers and users for better discovery, etc.? 💰 🎯 Marketing / Sales Are our sales and marketing teams and strategies fully aligned, to drive the growth we need? Are they aligned on the growth proposition, positioning, offerings, messaging, campaigns? Are their activities joined-up to ensure we’re maximising our team’s efforts? 📱🤖 Product / Technology Is our product roadmap aligned with the tech team on development effort vs reward? Are we introducing features / tech that solves a genuine user problem that they will value? Do product teams know how much flex they have for feature variations and implementations? ...and these are just the tip of the iceberg! ❤️ FREE Hidden Risks workshops We've designed workshops that will turn your biggest hidden risks into your biggest growth opportunities: https://lnkd.in/eemQW7V2 If this sounds interesting, and you would like to learn more, just message us or email james@1210s.com. Let’s chat! #startups #ventures #seriesa #scaleups #investors #venturecapital #portfolio #risks #designthinking #workshops #product #productdesign #sales #marketing #technology

*** Launching: FREE ‘Hidden Risks’ workshops for startups *** We've spoken with hundreds of people in the startup world this year: Founders, Execs, Heads, Fractional Experts, VCs, Product teams, etc. Our biggest takeaway was this – ‘hidden risks’ are a major issue for startups that have gained traction and are focusing on mid-term growth. 🔎 Hidden risks? They are the big assumptions, gaps in thinking, and misalignments that will hurt your business as it grows. They are caused by needing to focus on the short-term and working at pace. Even if you're aware of them, they are so often put on the "we'll deal with it later" pile. But if startups expect to achieve sustainable growth, they can’t afford to ignore these hidden risks. 🤼 1. Between teams Startups have great teams across their business. But because they’re working at pace, it’s hard bringing everyone together to consider all the inter-dependencies in their strategies and roadmaps. This creates hidden risks that can lead to tensions and serious growth issues. 🌧 2. Unhappy paths Startups know how to deliver products. But their focus is so often on short term gains. They don’t get to consider all the ‘unhappy paths’ – the things that can go wrong; regulatory risks; escalating bug fixes, support, etc. – that will increasingly slow down progress and growth. 💣 3. Mounting debt Startups that focus on short-term gains often need to cut corners. But the sum of all their short-term design decisions, tech hacks, sales hustles, operational workarounds, etc., creates a mounting debt that must be tackled if the business wants to reach sustainable growth. 🚀 Launching FREE workshops for startups Workshops are our superpower: we have certified design coaches and facilitators; we've run masterclasses at global conferences; we've invented methodologies; we have 1,000s hours experience. So we've decided to launch a series of workshops for startups – to turn ‘hidden risks’ into your biggest growth opportunities. *** And we're offering FREE initial workshops! *** If this sounds good and you would like to learn more, just message us on LinkedIn, or email james@1210s.com, and let’s chat. https://lnkd.in/ebp_bdU8 #startups #ventures #scale #workshops #risks #coaching #innovation #growth #derisk #designthinking

James Bailey shares his appreciation of 'that scene' from The Founder - on both the great storytelling at play and the great design principles you can take away from the McDonald's backstory. #blog #design #designprinciples #designthinking #servicedesign

The final part of James Bailey's recent benchmark of startup pitches, highlighting the third big gap that he kept seeing, which is risking businesses and investors from the get go. #ventures #startups #pitches #design #benchmark #product #productdesign #servicedesign

James Bailey was recently invited onto Jarrod Cocksedge podcast to share his perspective on the design industry – on the various forces at play that are impacting both individual designers and the design industry in general. Hopefully you find it interesting – and please do reach out to James if you fancy a chat about the design industry, your journey, design work to be done, etc. #podcast #design #designindustry #productdesign #servicedesign #strategicdesign #research #startups #ventures #innovation

I’ve been benchmarking a LOT of early stage startup pitches recently – it started out of curiosity but then I started to see these same gaps appearing over and over again. Maybe it's because a lot of early stage startups use cookie-cutter pitch decks, or because they approach their pitch with a business or technology bias and lack a balanced design lens – I can't say for sure. But what I can say is that these gaps mean too many startups are making huge assumptions and leaps in judgement. They are seriously risking their business and investments from the get-go. 🙄 1. No real world customer insight or evidence that there's a genuine problem to solve. Startups are pinning all their hopes and money on a hunch they have something great. They're not spending time with target customers in the real world to truly understand what they need and value, and to gather early evidence that their value proposition is on the right track. The risk: there’s no real market need for your product. 😬 2. Weak market diagnosis and competitive strategy. Startups aren’t looking deep enough at their competitor’s positioning, business models, and product offerings – they lack analysis on why their competitors are winning or losing in the market, and therefore why their approach has 'the right win'. The risk: your business will be outcompeted. 🤔 3. Not making user-centred design and craft your differentiator. Startups are rushing their MVP out the door, or cramming in too many features, delivering a product they think users will value – but which falls short of benchmark levels, offering a sub-par user experience and design that doesn’t stand out in the crowd. And first impressions are everything. The risk: no-one wants to use your product, they turn to competitors. ...Sure, every startup is based on a hypothesis of a problem to solve and the desire to bring a MVP to market as soon as possible, so that you can see what traction you get in the real world. But these gaps are such a fundamental risk to startups and their investors. They’re huge holes. They should be called out and closed early on. They don’t even need that much effort to close – just a bit more research, rigorous thinking, and early design effort will go a long way towards reducing your risk. I’ll dig into these gaps and how I would approach closing them soon, but would love to hear your thoughts if you want to share? #startups #venture #pitch #pitchdeck #pitchexamples #businesscase #risks #design

I’ve seen a lot of startup pitch decks recently – so I decided to share a handy list of the core components you need to include to increase your chances with investors. It's nothing revolutionary, but if it helps you then I'm happy! #guide #startup #startups #pitch #pitches