Our top 3 tips for designing winning propositions in 2022

 Will Jones photo
Will Jones Executive Creative Director
2min read

1. Your customers don’t care about your products

We wrote about this back in 2018 and we believe it now more than ever. Starting from a solid Jobs to be Done (JTBD) foundation is the best way to design products and propositions that help people achieve the outcomes they’re shooting for in life.

Over the past four years, we’ve doubled down on building a market-leading research practice to help our clients really understand their customers by asking the right questions.

2. Investing time in defining the right problem in the right way will save you time and money down the line

With almost all new products and services, speed to market is critical. But cutting corners in the discovery phase is not the way to move quickly. While you might save 3-4 weeks at the start, you’ll slow down dramatically in the ‘define’ and ‘develop’ phases.

cutting corners in the discovery phase is not the way to move quickly.

One of the key things we’ve noticed is that the difference between proposition success and failure is clear purpose. Why does your new product exist? What purpose does it fulfil for customers?

Our Proposition Lab approach is the result of years of applying test and learn principles to our processes as well as our outputs. It has the right balance of speed and rigour, evidence and ideation. We’re able to make huge progress in those 12 weeks - primarily by focusing on the right things at the right time.

3. There’s more to a good proposition than customer love

The fastest route to failure is not thinking early enough about all the things needed to underpin your proposition. Yes, designing something that promises to deliver new customers and commercial value is critical for every new proposition. But you also need to know what it takes to deliver on that promise. An early view on things like data, tech, regs, ops and even content is the difference between getting something live and getting stuck in the weeds.

We have so much faith in this that we’ve written a whole report about it - it’s fresh out this month and you can be among the first to read it by going here.

 Will Jones
About the author

Will Jones

Will leads the design tribe at 11:FS, pushing the quality of our design thinking, brand development and experience design. Will has spent the last decade at agencies such as DigitasLBi, driving creative projects for world-leading companies within fintech and beyond.