tl;dr | Connecting Taiwan Model to Product Design Process
The pandemic taught us a lot. What is really important in life, how to cherish in time, how to connect with each other when we are apart, and more. In the third part of this series, I want to share something the pandemic taught me about product development.
Know the user, culture & value
If other countries want to, they can just duplicate what the Taiwan government did and apply it to their countries. However, if they do so, it is highly possible they will see different outcomes in their countries.
It wasn’t intuitive to me that earlier in the year in many western countries, people were protesting due to the government asking them to wear masks. As mentioned in the previous article, wearing masks in Taiwan is such a common thing. Many of my friends could not understand why either.
Just like what you see in the product design world, if a company just duplicates what the competitors have done, the consumers in different markets may react to the same feature differently. What makes sense to you, your users may not have the same reaction as you or people around you do.
So, how well do you and your product team know about your target audiences in the market? Do you know what they believe and how their beliefs connect to their reactions to the new feature your company is about to launch?
Strength & Resource
Taiwan has been taking the pandemic seriously since the beginning, not because we knew it’s going to be huge, but because we knew that we would not be able to access the latest information as other countries would due to political reasons. That could have been the shortage to react to the crisis but it ends up being our strength. Because we are aware of the constraint, so we prepared in advance.
The powerful manufacturing industry in Taiwan has shown an advantage in this pandemic by setting up the assembly lines of making masks and increasing productivity in a short period of time with scale.
Not having enough resources is a common reason why a company is not able to succeed. However, if your team is small, you should be able to adapt to the market rapidly compared to the giant, well-polished companies. Can you think of your strength and the resources you can take advantage with? Compared to your competitors, do you have stronger branding? Talented team? Local knowledge? Benefited partners?
Leadership & environment
In the previous articles, I mentioned key people like Vise President, Chen Chien-jen, Vice Premier, Chen Chi-mai, Minister of Health and Welfare, Chen Shih-chung, and Taiwan Digital Minister Audrey Tang. They have explained the situation to the public scientifically, demonstrated the principles of preventing inflection publically, and shown the right attitude to face the crisis continuously. All these form the positive sentiment in society. With that, the epidemic experts can focus on investigating the solution based on the best knowledge they have and the latest status they observed. With that, different sectors from the government and different companies from the industry support what the CECC announced and follow the policy.
Think about the problems your team is trying to solve.
Do the leaders in the team or the company explain what we want to achieve logically? Is the team convinced and aligned with the approach we are going to take? Do the leaders respect the experts in different fields? Do they create a positive environment? Do different departments or cross-functional teams support each other and follow the process?
Mechanisms enable initiatives from the members
We wouldn’t know how the situation in Taiwan would be without the first mask map from an engineer, or the open letter from a Taiwanese student, and the crowdfunding project led by a YouTuber. However, I think it’s fair to say they definitely helped push things forwards and inspire more ideas.
The question is, why would the engineer, the student, and the YouTuber voluntarily put the effort to contribute? When they did something, others listened, echoed, inspired, supported, and more voices spoke then inspired more.
Besides the positive environment encourages the members to contribute, when they want to, are there mechanisms to enable the new ideas from the ground? Will the ideas be taken into consideration and getting feedback? Does the positive loop of “initiative, listened, considered, reacted, and inspired the next initiative” exist in your team?
Communicating to users effectively
Lastly but definitely most importantly, the official announcement is spreading out efficiently. There is almost no room for fake news as the communication channels are accessible for almost everyone. The information is transparent and open for discussion. All the questions are welcomed. All the confusion can be answered by the hotline. The government knows its people well enough to be able to communicate with them effectively.
So, in your product team, will you be able to communicate with your target users effectively? Do you know their culture and taboo well enough? Will they be able to differentiate messages from your official channel(s) and rumors? Who can they reach out if they encounter issues or confusion?
If we see different regimes as a spectrum, from extreme liberty to extreme autocracy, in the extreme autocracy scenario, all people follow one person’s word. That will be extremely efficient, which is critical in the pandemic in the early stage. However, people won’t be encouraged to share their thoughts, neither take any initiatives. It naturally forms a “just follow what the boss said” team. In the early stage to build a product, that helps to ship things out fast. The question is, how close the boss is to the end-users? Do they share the same life experience? Do they have the same level of knowledge? Do they physically or financially have similar abilities? Do we believe the users’ reactions can be reflected by the boss’s reaction?
In reality, usually people can’t choose which country or regime they want to stay with. Even if they want to make a change, it’s not an easy task. However, in today’s world, consumers never face so many options, services, and products as today. When the boss is satisfied with the product based on his preference, the consumers may or may not agree with him. And they have tons of other options to switch to.
On another end of the spectrum, in an extremely liberal world, everyone can share their opinion and everyone is used to sharing their opinion. The next question will be, what do we do with those opinions? How do we come out with a polished solution from those opinions? How do we communicate with the public why one or some of the opinions are selected but not the rest of the others? How can we encourage the crowds to keep sharing their opinions even though their ideas were not picked before? How can we create an open, respectful, and inclusive environment so that different voices can be heard? And don’t forget that all these processes take time and resources, like collecting ideas, categorizing ideas, discussing, arguing, selecting ideas, generating solutions, etc. Most importantly, what will be the deliverable and how to implement it?
We see the number of confirmed cases is just a number. The numbers represent the outcome of lots of effort from different aspects. Once you start asking “why this is the number”, it triggers a series of explanations to help us know more about context. Just like in the product design process, specifically online products, usually the metrics on the product dashboard play a huge role. In many companies, that defines the success or failure of the feature, and winning or losing the market share. Some companies take that as the north star for the team. However, that is similar to the number you’re seeing of confirmed cases. That tells you what the situation is but didn’t tell you why this is the situation. That didn’t give you more context as well.
It took us 17 years to face the next pandemic after SARS, so that we can evaluate how well the approach is, but nowadays the products keep updating much more frequently than ever before. A/B testing shows us how much optimization we can make by different iterations, but didn’t help us to learn why our users react to our products in this way.
Is it critical to know “why”?
You may ask.
How critical is the context in this series?
The flash you’re seeing now isn’t from the current light of the star.
How each of the countries reacts to the crisis not just depends on the current status of the country, but also what has happened in the past, and how the past has made the country what it is today.
I see that in the product development field as well.
