How to Create Flywheel Effect for Your Product

Using the Flywheel Concept in Product Design

Organisations undergo undramatic transition, rather than dramatic transformation, on path to greatness. There isn’t a single moment when companies become great, according to Jim Collins in his bestseller Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t (2001). Instead, companies gradually build momentum with continuous improvements and achievement of objectives to break through the threshold of greatness. Collins described it as the “flywheel effect”. He elaborated:

“Good to great comes about by a cumulative process—step by step, action by action, decision by decision, turn by turn of the flywheel—that adds up to sustained and spectacular results.”

The flywheel effect concept offers a useful way of thinking about creation of great product. Rather than eyeing that one elusive transformative moment, product creators and designers should focus on turning the flywheel to power the product towards greatness.

The flywheel effect thinking emphasises intention to improve and improvise — a continuous improvement to achieve business objectives and an ingenious improvisation within organisational constraints. So, what are the essentials to generate the flywheel effect for your product?

Prowling for Problems

A product is a perpetual beta. It needs to evolve to remain useful to customers or else, the Schumpeter’s gales of creative destruction will decimate its relevancy in the marketplace. To remain relevant, product creators and designers must persistently prowl for problems in the troughs of inconveniences. That troughs are where you can unearth gaping problems, insistent issues and frustrating frictions encountered by your customers when using your product. And that troughs are where innovators and creators get their product inspirations.

In today’s user-empathy zeitgeist, if something goes awry, fault lies with the products and not the users. That’s why when designing solutions, it is now becoming common for product designers to put themselves in customers’ shoes - pinpoint pain points and understand cognitive/physical limitations. In organisations, systematic problems spotting involve collection of quantitative data using analytical tools and compilation of qualitative data through user interviews and behavioural observations.

The data you collected, either from analytics or user interviews, are like jigsaw puzzle pieces. The more pieces you have, the better you can piece together a more complete and richer picture of reality. And then you are able to design solution that matches user needs and expectations.

Optimally, product design teams must to get out of the office building and see how users use products in a variety of environments. Purposely seek out the outliers, the on-the-fringe use cases of your product. Things happening on the edge tend to sway away from the norms and they provide helpful guidance on what to improve and inspiration for innovation. The truth is out there!

Before settling on online storage idea, Drew Houston (founder of Dropbox) was searching for problems to solve. He was eventually inspired, thanks to nagging inconveniences he had experienced with online files sharing. Despite the existence of over a dozen online storage products in 2006, there isn’t a solution that meets his expectations, in terms of functionality and usability. He went on to create Dropbox to exploit the prevalent yet overlooked deficiency and double-down on product user experience as competitive lever to outflank the competition. Below is a screenshot from Hacker News website where Houston described the conception of Dropbox.

Companies like Dropbox are constantly productising problems that lurks in every nook and cranny of the economic superstructure. Over time, only products that deliver superior solutions to problems can gain a better chance at user uptake and growth upside.

Experiment the Experience

In addition to problem spotting, conduct experimentation for problem solving. The experimentation capability is imperative for competitive advantage in today’s dynamic marketplace.

“The rate of the development of science is not the rate at which you make observations, but much more important, the rate at which you create new things to test.” (Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize-winning physicist)

The rate at which organisation creates new ideas to test is now becoming a yardstick of success. A designed solution is a hypothesis, one in a vast array of possibilities. When you experiment, you enhance your product’s odds of success in the marketplace. Create prototypes and co-create an optimal solution with your customers. Use interactive prototypes to collect richer feedbacks and to probe deeper the functional requirements and emotional expectations of your customers. After each experimentation, make time to pause-and-ponder on the results and refine your design solution.

Conclusion

This essay is an attempt to incorporate flywheel effect thinking into product design. Turn by turn of the flywheel, gradually gaining momentum with habits like problem spotting and experimentation and eventually, your product will cross the threshold of greatness.

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Photo by Scott Webb on Unsplash