13 April 2023

Design innovation methods

This was another business minded course about improving existing product offerings based on their feasibility in a business setting. With my group, I analysed Netflix’s business, the market and proposed changes that can improve both the customer experience and Netflix’s market position.

We learned how to use various methods. Many are based on personas, for who a Value Proposition Canvas (VPC) can be made. This is a tool to fill in the customer needs, pains and gains, and the product’s offerings, pain creators and gain creators. Using this VPC, products can be changed or altered to reach a better fit with the target users. We used a VPC to first analyse Netflix’s current offerings, later to adapt our ideas to reach a better product-market fit. Similarly, we used a problem-solution-fit canvas to determine whether our idea solves the problem well enough.

We used more tools, like a user experience journey map, stakeholder diagrams, PESTEL frameworks, service blueprints, SWOT analysis and more, all to analyse Netflix’s business setting and their customers, to offer a good idea for Netflix to add. Eventually, our final idea was to allow users to customize their subscription plan. This could make Netflix a more interesting option for users, allow users to tweak their plan and pay only for what they use. This idea was tested with users through a minimum viable product, which showed that users were more likely to pay extra for something like more simultaneous screens or higher video quality. Throughout our process however, we worked on multiple ideas. From this course, I really learned how to keep business in mind when being innovative and that these methods can not only be used to come up with a business proposal for an existing ideas, but also to create new ideas which would perform well in a business setting.

tags: Business - value - customer - market - product - innovation