Vision As Driving Force In Conceiving Software And Digital Products

Devising and deploying software and digital products have become significant even for companies whose core business isn’t in those domains(eg:an app created by a paper manufacturer that helps people order their paper products online).

Many strategies and methodologies are used to conceptualise, create and deploy these products.

But one aspect which has a significant impact in the quality of such a product is often overlooked: True Personal Vision. It’s the vision that’s innate to you, to be found in your own self and nowhere else.

How True Personal Vision becomes important in product conception

Influence Maps

Basing any action purely on guesswork could be disastrous in a business scenario. This is especially true in terms of deploying software and digital products.

The curious fact is that the mix of hardware and software development resources available gives you a lot of leeway to create products. But equally important as creating a functional product is ensuring that the product solves a problem of your potential customers or make their lives better in some way.

Technically speaking, this could be tackled with doing market research. After all, understanding the customer’s pain-points are the best way to create a product that would help solve those problems, isn’t it?

The answer to that question is yes. However, there is a major issue with finding the the right product idea like that- any businesses with similar resources to yours could do the same. In other words, by following this path, you face the potential threat of entering an over-served market with a similar product offering as others.

In this context, your vision could be the most important differentiator.

A real life example

For better clarity on this, let’s look at a real life example.

While there’s an ongoing debate among many as to whether the company, Apple has lost its edge as as innovative powerhouse, there’s no doubt that there have brought out some of the most useful devices in the modern commercial landscape. One of them is the iPod.

The first version of the iPod was introduced in October 23, 2001. The product became an instant hit as people began to play numerous hits on it.

Apple

Looking back on the first device, we may not feel that it’s groundbreaking in any way. After all, we can now carry as many songs in our mobile phones which give great playback too. That may well be true but what shouldn’t be missed is that no one was really demanding for  a device to store hundreds of songs and which they could carry in their pockets and with which they could use to play the music.

The idea for the device came out of Steve Job’s vision of making digital products as customer friendly as possible. And what could be more friendly than something that helps you carry way more number of songs than you may even listen to!

In the process, Jobs also created a product that stood on its own- simply because nothing of the kind existed at that time. In other words, the market iPod entered was competition-free.

This wouldn’t have been possible if it wasn’t for Job’s deeply personal vision of marrying digital innovations with human convenience.

This is not to say that practices like market research are without value. Far from it. For instance, to continue with our example of the music consuming population, a grassroots research could reveal just how many people in a given city or state are heavy consumers of music as opposed to casual consumers.

Such considerations in turn could address the kind of product that needs to be delivered.

But in the absence of vision, the product could be generic in nature, and fail to make a particular impact in the consumer’s life. For instance, without the vision of convenience, the product may well be yet another clunky speaker which you could install in your home. After all, in theory, there’s nothing to say that such a product wouldn’t serve a music-loving population.

But neither would such a product be the iconic iPod.

This mode of creating significant products is applicable in software products as well.

Temenos Vision Lab

Now that we have seen how much of a game-changer personal vision could be in delivering digital or software products, the question arises as to how to discover your True Personal Vision.

Temenos Vision Lab or TVL is a unique session developed by Temenos+Agility that helps you discover your True Personal Vision. Created based on 25 years of business consultancy experience and psychological insights, TVL is led by some of the best leadership coaches in business.

Temenos Effect Gathering

Temenos Effect Gathering 2018- Bengaluru, India(Dec 29, 2018)

An event dedicated to the idea of personal mastery, for nurturing your beautiful self, for change agents and leaders to become their true selves.

For more details, visit our website: https://www.visiontemenos.com/events


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