«Problem Solving» Is The Foundation Of Any Successful Product. — Medium

«Problem Solving» is the foundation of any successful product. As Tony Fadell brilliantly explains it in this TED talk the challenge in solving problems is to look at the world with child eyes to find invisible problems, the one we don’t even see, deeply hidden in our daily habits. Our flagship product solved many problems. We designed a self-order kiosk for our biggest client: a big QSR chain. Or 4 generations of self-order kiosks I should say: it all started 12 years ago. 3 problems solved in a single product: The kiosk improved the flow of customers making the life of the restaurant team easier. We increased the average check for the store owner with suggestive sales. And the most important problem: we brought a convenient experience for our client customers. Reducing dramatically the queue. Providing an intuitive way to discover the products, with no pressure from the hostess or the next customer in line. All of that in different languages… Is «problem solving» sufficient to make a successful product? I’d like to think an additional parameter is key: following a vision. Our client was following a vision: their customers should be served at the table. As a first response to this new challenge, our client customers would choose a zone on the self-order kiosk and sit waiting to be served. But it was not easy to know in advance in where you wanted to sit, or to read a map, to know if sits would be available in that zone… Our client customers often ended somewhere else in the restaurant. It became common to see the restaurant team running in the restaurant, screaming an order number hoping to find the right person: the food got colder, the team got exhausted, and the customer, even if waiting sitting is better than standing… Was still waiting. Was it the right technology? Probably not. We are about to launch a new product. We didn’t have to see the world with child eyes, the problem was very visible and our customer was clearly stating the need to find a solution. But I like the way we came up with the product we’re launching today, where the «vision» played a very important role. It was 2 years ago. We started from a blank page. Not from a technology. And listed all possible combination of technology that would provide: a convenient and transparent experience for their customers, no additional work from the restaurant team and still being affordable for the restaurant owner. We found 7 different possible path to follow. And focused on a particular one: Bluetooth. It is affordable, it would bring a sufficient accuracy. Ans even more: Bluetooth was embedded in any new smartphone (Apple was launching the iBeacon protocol). This is where our vision played an important role. As a company, after the kiosk, we watched another innovation coming for our client: mobile ordering. On purpose, we never committed ourselves in this field. Because we believed that the self-order kiosk solved a lot of problems. We didn’t believe that mobile-online ordering (the possibility to order in advance), would solve as many problems as the self-order kiosk did. We never believed that the smartphone could be, in any way, in competition with the kiosk. However, we always believed that the smartphone could solve complementary problems such as payment, loyalty… And in our case, the smartphone could solve the table service problems. Our client customers would order on a kiosk and we would then locate their smartphone inside the restaurant. Allowing the restaurant team to head directly where the customer is, serving orders faster. No more stress: happy customers, happy team, happy owner, happy client with a brand always on the edge of innovation. Of course we have to allow customers without smartphone to be served as well, so we came up with a token dispensed at the kiosk. But the technology inside that token was driven buy this vision: what would the customer journey look like in 5 years? How anticipate this not yet existing potential behaviour? Is this vision the right one? We’ll probably know in a few month time now!