Uber: Follow their Lead with Your Next 10 Initiatives
I recently used Uber for the first time. Afterwards, I was so impressed I burst into my office raving about it to my colleagues. (What can I say? I’m not easily impressed… but when you’ve earned it, you’ve earned it.)
My excitement revolved around Uber’s usual selling points: reasonable cost, extreme simplicity, and—most importantly—total convenience. But beneath these easy-to-appreciate elements I found a deeper joy—the joy of discovering a perfect example of how us techies can improve the day-to-day lives of our stakeholders.
Too often we come to our users with overly-complicated, feature-laden systems that attempt to do everything and never end up accomplishing anything. Sometimes because we can’t get these beasts green-lit without the kitchen sink. Sometimes because these ambitious systems are too bloated to execute effectively in the real world.
Uber took the opposite track and achieved opposite results.
They aimed to do just one little thing very well, and in the process they’ve changed everything in one of the most entrenched industries out there. (Much like AirBnB, which was recently valued higher than Hyatt.)
Take Uber’s example to heart. Simplify your systems. Focus on improving one currently-frustrating element of user experience. Sometimes dreaming up something incredible and new is the right way to go. But more often we’re here to streamline, improve, and enhance our users’ experiences. Whether that’s catching a cab home at the end of a long day, or providing a simpler way to access marketing data for an ongoing campaign.
So block out a little time today to brainstorm how you can bring this ethos to your own work. Grab a pen and paper. Write down ten currently-frustrating processes in your users’ day-to-day professional lives. Then brainstorm at least one way, for each process, that IT might be able to make it faster, easier, or more convenient. Do it now.
When you’re done, you will have 10 “first steps” for your next 10 initiatives.
