Huld has long history and vast amount of design expertise from various domains starting from designing usable products, machines, and devices with requirements for outstanding user experience to designing complex information systems, desirable digital services, and new business models.
The early innovation phase is crucial for successful product or service development project: 80% of costs determined in the early phases, i.e. the innovation and design phase. Design Thinking methodology is widely adopted as an framework to evaluate business value, identify end users and other stakeholders and their desires, to ask the “why” question. This piece of text introduces our approach for design thinking and how we applied it to design our own service.
I’m a sales guy and joined Huld a couple of years ago. I was astonished about the broadness and depth of expertise, especially in the field of design. I got very excited about business design and Huld being a forerunner in engineering professional service scene investing to build capability to help our customers in very early phases of the innovation process. I heard countless times customers saying “We have digitalization high in our strategic agenda and we’ve now rolled a new ERP but could there be more we could do?”, “We are building our IoT capabilities and collecting huge amount of data from different sources and next we need to figure out how to turn it to new business models” or “We’re very good in product design but our competitors are building new service concepts around their products – we should too” and so on. Obviously Design Thinking offers a good toolbox to start answering these questions.
So why it seemed to be so difficult to sell our services even though we have so good expertise on this field? What is our value proposition when starting point is unclear also for the customer? What can we really deliver to help our clients to overcome the fuzziness?
We have a pain, a fuzzy idea what is needed but no clear vision of how it could be achieved. How come it sounds so familiar?
That’s why we decided to eat our own dog food. Why not to apply our expertise to design our service? To define the business model and create a solid value proposition that is easy to sell for our 40+ people sales force and easy to understand and purchase for business owners and decision makers of our customers?
Our service design team started to create and productize our service concepts with the following objectives:
Quite soon it got evident that we will need some modularity: the steps needed from the fuzzy idea with unclear business benefits to a prototype or an MVP vary a lot depending on the project. Usually, it doesn’t even make sense to decide about proceeding unless the big picture, business case and “why and to whom to do this” are crystal clear.
Huld Design Puzzle service got scoped again concentrate on the big picture and business validation, aiming to answer to the following questions:
Once the big picture and business value have been cleared, the customer is able to make the decision for moving to next steps – either with Huld or without. Also, no-go decision is a valuable result and may potentially save a big pile of money.
So what exactly do you get when you purchase a Design Puzzle service? In fixed calendar time – 2 weeks (yes of course we will tailor this based on your schedules) – you get from the fuzzy starting point to a validated, refined and documented view on the case, a roadmap to continue or capability to decide not to continue with this idea but move in to the next one. You will get the whole knowledge base of 450 Huldians and tailored team that best fits your need whether it is a digital service, intelligent device, industrial equipment, or production line that you’re planning.
Is it selling? Hell yeah! We’re currently running multiple projects, please check our latest reference stories:
What’s your fuzzy idea? Let’s get it to Design Puzzle to lose the fuzziness!
Tuomas Martin
Director, Digital Innovations
+358 40 7116935