Hiring the Right Product to Get the Job Done (Better)

Jon FordDeveloper, Healthcare Leave a Comment

Since reading Clayton Christensen’s groundbreaking book “The Innovator’s Dilemma” almost twenty years ago, I was hooked on finding and capitalizing on disruption. “The Innovator’s Solution” and “Seeing What’s Next” complete the framework for explaining past disruptive innovations as well as identifying potential future ones. If you are in search of your next business books to read, I highly recommend them all.

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Jon Ford

VP Engineering

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Advances in Graphics Processing Units (GPU) and deep learning have led the way to a cost-effective delivery of incredible speech services in a market formerly dominated by a few large incumbents. At nVoq, we are riding this disruptive innovation feature curve. And, we’ve had some luck along the way. However, according to Christensen and his co-authors in their most recent book “Competing Against Luck”, luck can be mostly removed from the equation in calculating the odds that products will succeed.

Innovative product adoption can seem hit and miss. Marketing, sales, social media, and rapid iteration steer products toward the target – increasing the odds of success. Agile companies quickly and continuously adjust course, trying to find the right path to a great product. Product teams, including ours, work diligently to improve the user experience. How are our customers using our application? How can we make it easier for them to do so? Is the experience enjoyable? Answers to questions like these, then, drive the next round of features and enhancements. This improves products and the user’s experience. But, it’s often just fast trial and error. What really drives adoption? What causes one product to thrive while another doesn’t? Can we understand these dynamics well enough to avoid all the trial and error? The evidence and our experience at nVoq suggests that we can.

“Competing Against Luck” makes the case that all of us have “jobs to be done” and that we “hire” products to help us make progress in the completion of these jobs. Product success can be predicted by the degree to which it helps customers make progress toward job completion. This is easy to say, but not necessarily easy to do. Products are typically described in terms of features and benefits. For example, nVoq delivers value to our customers through fast and accurate speaker independent dictation, desktop process automation, and voice command and control. But, how do those features actually help our customers? Do those features help them get their jobs done? Based on adoption and direct customer feedback, yes. But, this is a result of relentless iteration and improvement. Today we are focused on helping our customers do their jobs better, resulting in a lot less trial and error.

nVoq serves primarily healthcare and customer care professionals. They want to provide great patient and customer care. They want to get their jobs done so they hire nVoq’s products to help them. We deliver great features like dictation and automation with benefits of speed, accuracy, and process compliance. But, those features only matter in that they help provide great care. They remove roadblocks, eliminate workarounds, and improve the speed and quality of job completion. We even help IT do their job of providing secure and reliable computing by delivering our products from the cloud – no tedious desktop installation and maintenance required. We have learned that our products are better when we focus on the customers’ jobs rather than the features and benefits. But, that’s not enough.

To insure a product is hired, barriers to adoption and the inertia of competing solutions need to be mitigated. Christensen’s book outlines a scenario where a man needed a new mattress. That mattress would provide him with a good night’s sleep. Quality rest would then enable him to be a better husband, father, and business man. As it turns out, the new mattress was competing primarily with a bad old mattress, Red Bull, and Ibuprofen. This should be a no-brainer. But the standard mattress purchasing process was bad enough to prevent the man from choosing a new mattress over caffeine and pain relievers. To him, even a perfect mattress was not an option if he had to purchase it at a mattress store. In the end, the man bought this new mattress at Costco – no sales pressure, no potentially dirty mattresses, and an unconditional return policy. The barrier to change was removed and the man could “hire” a new mattress to help him get quality sleep to perform in the key areas of his life.

We’d like to think our customers hire nVoq because of the cool features we offer like fast, accurate dictation, and easy to use automations that can be managed in-house. But that’s not the real reason.

Our customers hire nVoq products because we help them do their jobs quicker and with fewer errors, at an affordable price, and because we take away the pain of adopting a new product. As a cloud solution, there is no desktop installation, no software to purchase, and no need for IT support. Simply sign up for a free trial and start using the nVoq platform today – risk free, including a mobile microphone for iPhone and Android.
What job are you trying to do? Provide great service? Provide great patient care? nVoq can help you do it better.

Contact us at 866-383-4505 or sales@nvoq.com to learn more.

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