Which way are you pointing?

Which problem are you solving? Often it’s the wrong one. 

When faced with a business challenge, we’re often tempted to solve the NEXT thing without taking time to understand the RIGHT thing to solve. 

We wind up shortsighted and miss the real problem we need to solve for. This only fuels more frustration, more unhappy customers, and more dwindling cash flow. It's a vicious whirlpool threatening to sink the ship.

What you need is to define your North Star. A simple, yet powerful way to know what you are trying to solve for. 

A North Star has 4 things

  1. It has to be Simple
  2. It defines Value to your customers
  3. It reflects changes in their journey
  4. It correlates to revenue (but it's NOT revenue)

A good example of that is our friends at Airbnb. They were able to come up with a clear defined problem to solve: Get More Nights Booked.

Their North star is Nights Booked. It's simple, talks about the user value and defines success for them. 

If Airbnb would have used revenue as their North Star, rather than nights booked, they might have skewed the business to high-priced properties. Instead, they focused on delivering the same magical experience whether a night cost $100 or $1,000, and built a customer base of evangelists. 

So what's your North Star? Which way are you pointing? 

Ensure your strategy is actually solving for what really matters… value creation!

That’s what creative thinking is all about.

 

See you next time!

 

 

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