Test your idea against the ones from your competitors
A Service Design Principle to better test your next service or product idea.
You give to a kid a lollipop for his birthday. He is happy and thanks you! Awesome you made a great gift. Now comes someone else and offers a PlayStation to that kid. The lollipop doesn’t exist anymore in the mind of the kid.
A lollipop isn’t a bad gift usually. But when compared to other birthday gifts, it kind of sucks.
I feel the same thing happens when we test early shitty drafts of an idea of our service or product (1). We try our idea and show only that one to people. People always see something lovely in something you present them. So you are confident your early idea is pretty good, as is the lollipop. But we forget that this idea will be compared to its competitors and doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
In the book “Design Sprint”, there is this advice “It’s almost always a good idea to present your solution alongside the competition. As a matter of fact, you can ask customers to test out your competitors’ products on Friday right alongside your own prototype.”
When you test your idea against the ideas of your competitors, you can discover what your competitors do better and why.
You can see where people notice the difference between you and your competitors. And once you know that, you can double down on that parts of your service and experience to make it even more captivating.
It’s also smart because building several prototypes of an idea might take a lot of time. You can just consider your competitor's ideas as other prototypes.
This idea gets even more interesting when you think about competition in a larger way.
A competitor doesn’t have to be a direct competitor. For example, the competition of a church is not always another church, but it can also be a meditation app like Headspace, which also gives meaning in life and a sense of community (2).
So let me ask you this:
What indirect competitor could you use to find out if your next idea really helps people as much as you think?
Footnotes
(1) What service designers love to call prototypes.
(2) The founder of Netflix apparently said the same thing about his service. “Think of any night you did not watch Netflix,” he said. “We compete with drinking a bottle of wine. That’s a particularly tough one.”
Daniele's personal notes
- This is the first draft of this Service Design Principle.
- Once adapted, even more, this principle could be part of the book "Service Design Principles 201-300"
- As always feel free to share comments, feedback or personal stories to improve this principle.
The second draft of this principle
You give a kid a lollipop for his birthday. He is happy and thanks you! Awesome, you made a great gift. Now comes someone else and offers a PlayStation to that kid. The lollipop doesn’t exist anymore in the mind of the kid.
Footnotes
Daniele's notes
The third draft of this Service Design Principle