überproduct is here!
Hello World,
überproduct is here to be!
überproduct, that’s Christian and Markus, well … there’s more. There’s a whole network of people around us on top. People, we’ve worked with well, successful and with fun in other situations and contexts and with whom we like to continue working. People who are close and important to us.
For years we have conceived, designed and delivered products in the most different constellations. We realized that for one, we are doing that quite well and, over time, have improved our knowledge in how to that ever better. But indeed, to us it’s a hell of a blast! And to make that even more of a blast, we now want to create our own products, but also want to help as many others in getting better at creating products that simply work or are even loved and to have fun in doing so as well.
In the time we were doing this, we realized there are two main ingredients to successful products: Great people and extreme user centricity. And that’s exacrly what we want to offer to you!
Before going into depth, a word about our basics: With ‘buying us’ you’ll get extreme user centricity in the package. In the past we’ve cleary, and sometimes painfully, realized, that even the most simple, clearest and even most obvious idea most of the time time isn’t worth the whiteboard is was developed on by even the smartest product managers, however demanding or cozy the offsite was. Most of these ideas don’t stand the test of an upfront interview with the actual customer. We have experienced companies that didn’t realize that their business model and offered products or services completely and exactly miss their clients needs. They didn’t realize, because they never ever really deeply looked into their customers life, environment and real needs. And these were smart people! It’s so simple to just get stuck behind your desk, in your cubicle, in your fancy or less fancy meeting rooms and lose sight of the real world around you and finally lose contact with your customer and to busily die in a world full of noise without any signal.
We’d love to show you easy and pragmatic ways to develop products in a radically user centric way. It is fun and it saves buckets of cash because you simply can’t build products in plain ignorance of your customers. Quite the opposite: Your customers needs will be revealed in plain sight.
While conceiving new products, we use a lot of the techniques of Design Thinking or sequences of the double diamond and that means: A deep first phase of actually deeply understanding the problem we are trying to solve. And by that we mean understanding the problem from the customers’ perspective. This does, of course, not work by asking the client what his problems are, but by watching his everyday life, his behaviors, his context, his using our product and then synthesizing his needs out of our observations. Baed on this understanding of the problem and the users behaviors and context, we define the product in hard and challenging diverging and converging phases. Doing that, we create huge solution spaces and then again, reduce them radically by focusing on certain aspects. In the end, we get to valid, pragmatic product solutions, which were carefully and systematically filtered from a vast amount of options.
After validating the first ideas, all those nice tools from Lean Startup and Lean Entrepreneurship can now support refining the product and a sustainable business model around it. Also now, we still learn and adapt on many different layers in small steps, always based on user participation. Depending on the situation, the tools may range from A/B testing over lab interviews up to visiting the customer in his environment. We have the knowledge, experience and the people to show you how to do that on your own or to team up with you – and why not as a first, tiny baby step!
It matters to us, to show you how easy this can be! After seeing how it’s done and getting the hang of it, it doesn’t even cost a lot of money! Quite the contrary! We claim that validation vua prototypes is even saving you money. First, you get into a completely different, producing work mode. With this, many of your meetings will change their nature or will be canceled. Meetings will no longer be about exchange of sheer opinions. While producing and testing prototypes, while doing, gazillions of small and some big design decisions simply need to be done and will be done. Those decisions that teams can talk about for hours without actually getting to it. There are no theoretical discussions, but the talk is on real features of real prototypes that you can actually touch and use. All of this yields an incredibly acceleration of the creative process in discovery and exploration – those parts in which we finally get to get a grasp of the value we can deliver to the customer. And the cost is low compared to an average market research, which delivers to us medians and averages of quantitative data. It turns out it is hard to build great products based on averages and medians of data. The cost of recruiting and interviewing customers is small, if done right, but your advantage on insights will let you ride the competitive edge. The catalyst in the game is the prototype.
These prinviples are important to us and we would love to work with clients who care for these principles as much as we do, but may not exactly know how to realize them – or clients who want to get better at it, widen or deepen their capabilities. At the same there is no room for ideology. All this is highly contextual and works different in different environments and there’s no right or wrong. We’ve seen and had enough of method wars and are fond of our huge tool box. Different approaches from different areas may actually support and amplify each other rather than filter out, when done right. But yes, sometimes you have to be tough and strict.
Our prefer working with you or your team on the job. But we’re also working hard in designing and offering pragmatic and highly condensed hand on trainings. These trainings will be product focused because we see a huge gap in high quality, product focused trainings. If there’s any special demand or suggestion from your side regarding our open trainings or custom tailored trainings and workshops for your team or company, please simply contact us. We’re sure we can find and flexibly offer a solution.
überproduct exists because we think how to support and manage innovation in companies via the product. This is what we want to achieve with our new überproduct. It is not just meant to be on products but its also meant to be our best (über) product. We want deliver all things product: Trainings, (open or tailored, internal), innovation consulting, direct product support, we can be your product manager or even chief of product, validate your product ideas and concepts, help you conceive new products on speed you up in validated rapid prototyping, support you in delivering your products or might even build a start up for you.
We’re happy to meet you!
Christian and Markus