Find Your Product’s Optimal Price

To determine the optimal price of FitBark, Davide Rossi put plugins on the FitBark website that asked customers two simple questions. These questions were: “At what price does this product become too expensive?” and “At what price does this product feel like a steal?” People who answered the questions got a $10 discount and FitBark got tons of valuable data that helped it choose the … [ Read more ]

Authors: Davide Rossi, Dreamit | Source: "A Founder’s Guide to Product Pricing" | Original Publication: Medium | Subject: Pricing | Company: FitBark

Analyze Your Firm’s Jobs and Activities

McKinsey has been investigating the future impact of automation on the workplace. The firm structures its analysis around roughly 2,000 individual work activities and assesses the requirements for each of these activities against 18 different capabilities (see below) that potentially could be automated. Analyzing your own firm's jobs and activities with a similar framework would not only help plan for future disruptions, but also could … [ Read more ]

Authors: James Manyika, Mehdi Miremadi, Michael Chui | Source: "Four Fundamentals of Workplace Automation" | Original Publication: The McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Human Resources, Organizational Behavior

Ban Email

The pursuit of full transparency is behind one of GitLab’s most countercultural rules: a total ban on internal emails. For example, employees seeking information or help are required to request it through the appropriate Slack channel, which may eventually trigger changes to the employee handbook or another key document. The intent is to crystallize and capture the pooled expertise of the collective, rather than letting … [ Read more ]

Author: Benjamin Kessler | Source: "The Nuts and Bolts of Working for an All-Remote Company" | Original Publication: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior | Company: GitLab

The Energy Audit

Behavior changes, even those that represent clear benefits for employees, require active reinforcement — including accountability mechanisms and human champions. A management consulting team leader, worried about exhaustion on her teams, began encouraging more rest. But when the sincere urging hardly affected the entrenched behavior, she established “the energy audit.” Every workday she asked members of her team to email or text one item they were … [ Read more ]

Authors: Carolyn Black, Chad Gomes, Jon Katzenbach | Source: "The power of feelings at work" | Original Publication: strategy+business | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Apply Principles of Customer Experience Design to HR Practices

Applying customer experience strategy to employee experience begins with needs-based segmentation, grouping employees into clusters based on their wants and needs.  Most companies organize employees in standard groupings like job title, rank, department, business unit, or geography. But just as customer experience design requires a more nuanced understanding of customers than simple demographics or economic value, employee experience design should be based on employees’ drivers … [ Read more ]

Author: Denise Lee Yohn | Source: "Design Your Employee Experience as Thoughtfully as You Design Your Customer Experience" | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Human Resources

The Premortem Technique
The premortem technique is a sneaky way to get people to do contrarian, devil’s advocate thinking without encountering resistance. If a project goes poorly, there will be a lessons-learned session that looks at what went wrong and why the project failed—like a medical postmortem. Why don’t we do that up front? Before a project starts, we should say, “We’re looking in a crystal ball, and … [ Read more ]

Profit Mapping
A profit map, the core analytical tool of profitability management, displays the profitability and cost structure of every product in every customer in the company. Profit maps show exactly where profit is flowing and where it is lost.

A profit map is not especially difficult to develop, but it is completely different from the information developed for financial reporting. Many finance managers make the … [ Read more ]

Review Profitability Before Expanding Capacity
When faced with the need to expand manufacturing capacity and the inherent investment required, first perform a thorough profitability analysis (a profit map) of each product produced from the capacity-constrained factories (this includes profitable products being sold unprofitably to selected customers). Since many companies have a significant amount of unprofitable business, it is quite possible that stopping the unprofitable sales can free up enough capacity … [ Read more ]

Deploy a Redeployment Pool
Intel monitors changing skill requirements and institutes a redeployment program when it becomes necessary to downsize a business. Under this program, managers effectively lay off people, and the head count of the business unit is moved off the payroll. These excised people enter a redeployment pool under the auspices of human resources. Once in the pool, employees generally have four to six months, and can … [ Read more ]

Fiercest Competitor Workshop
One good way to get at these disruptive designs (innovations) is to do what we at my firm call a "Fiercest Competitor Workshop," which starts with the premise that you have been fired from your old organization but you have access to ample capital and talent. Your task is to design the fiercest competitor that could take the market from your old firm. In my … [ Read more ]