Building great products that customers want to use starts with building the right teams. 

Without a strong, engaged and happy team, you will probably not be as successful as you want to be. You can manipulate all your set goals and objectives but your efforts will still be unsuccessful in the eyes of the customer. And it all comes down to building an innovation team accountable to the users. 

First of all -What makes a great product? 

Great products don't suddenly appear out of nowhere. They are built by people, people who can understand the needs of the user and customers. They are in fact grown with passion, perseverance, and focus. 

To help build these products we use processes, co-creation, and insights to guide us in our decision making. With the goal of providing a useful, usable, compelling, and awesome experience for the users. 

They are delightful experiences, easy to use, and beautiful to look at, providing outstanding value to their users.

What makes a bad product? 

There are several reasons which can be attributed to the failure of a Product. One that seems to be one of the biggest moments of truth for customers is poor User Experience. Customers' awareness of great user experience has shifted to fundamental need in the last 10 years or so and if the products don’t measure up, the products are a failure. 

So how do you build great customer experiences? 

In short, a good customer experience can be achieved if you: Make listening to customers a top priority across the business. Use customer feedback to develop an in-depth understanding of your customers. Implement a system to help you collect feedback, analyze it, and act on it regularly.

Are we starting to see a pattern here? Experience seems to be the secret sauce of a great product experience.

So let’s talk about the people that work with building and growing that great product experience needs to have in place! 

The High Performing Innovative Product team

High Performing Product teams are small, collaborative, cross-functional teams that work to achieve the common outcome of creating an exceptional digital product. They are customer-obsessed. They interact with their customers directly to get first-hand feedback. They bring the voice of the user right into the heart of decision-making at every stage of the process. They share their insight and knowledge about the product with others outside the team. 

So what can you do to build your dream high-performing team? 

Stop focusing on the simple solutions in the transformation on investing in tech, invest in the people and the tech will adapt to it. Start now by onboarding your team into a creative culture that high performers strive in. Below are some examples of where to start. 

The right conditions for an innovative team.

• Creating a safe environment
• Encouraging people's passions in context to the team's mission
• Aligning the team's agenda to individual goals.
• Explore different mindsets that will help your team understand customers, your team, etc. 
• Using the same collaboration tools will help you skip the busy work and jump right into problem-solving and meeting your customer's needs. 

Innovation is like dieting, you just need to fucking start! Do you want to support your team training journey, drop your contact to the team and we will get back to you? =) 

Have a good one! 

Yeah, and don´t forget to smile, it looks good on you!
/ Joacim Alm
Founder of WilburFlow