Case: Productivity
Helping a seed stage US startup rethink their phygital product for new user groups
Facing a similar challenge?
The Challenge
Shifting the founding team mindset for a renewed product design
The team had built an elaborate and overly complicated ‘phygital’ (physical-digital) product comprising an app and a journal to help users built productivity habits. The core challenge involved shifting the mindset of the founding team to an outcomes-over-outputs mindset, and simplify the product led more by behavioral outcomes for narrower user segments for whom the product could provide high relevance and value.
Approach
Fabric led the team to pivot towards a behavior design-led approach, thereby de-prioritizing the creation of advanced features and gamification mechanics based on the existing highly complex system. Instead, we shifted focus to solving for user behaviors that responded to unarticulated and underserved needs, pain points, bottlenecks and desires - essentially mapping out fewer, clearer and tighter opportunity spaces around a couple of beachhead markets. This approach helped move the team away from the next-feature-fallacy and the build trap, to prioritising and testing for positive user behavior changes that would signal the product’s true usefulness and value in the extremely crowded world of personal productivity solutions.
Outcomes
The team was able to shift away from its ongoing build trap to identify and direct focus on an underserved potential beachhead - a massive global addressable market with a specific mental health condition, cut out a slew of irrelevant features in the process and improve on the few that mattered. The clarified product design direction helped the team concretise their user validation efforts and drive future product development.
