Understanding the Benefitting Individual

Take the opportunity to understand the Individual using the product or feature

Peter has just started a new leadership position at a company and he’s keen to meet and get to know the members of his new team. To make a good impression, he arranges to host a dinner on a Thursday evening at a well-known restaurant. Peter’s spirits are high and he believes his team will feel the same. However, when it comes to the day there is little attendance and those that do attend don’t quite share the same excitement as him.

Although the problem seems trivial, this is the type of situation that many leaders and businesses find themselves in when creating products and features for individuals. Gathering feedback is always helpful, but understanding the benefitting Individual, is a prerequisite for creating a well developed product or feature, which perhaps needs more consideration.

Going back to the previous example of the team dinner, what the new team leader, Peter, did not consider was that Thursday’s are generally not a convenient day for many people. Mike needs to take his child swimming after work and it’s the only night Gill can get a babysitter in for date night. He did not consider that a large number of the employees were vegetarian, and that the chosen restaurant specialised in seafood and lacked a variety of vegetarian options. Attendance at a place like this is likely to be low, with those that do attend doing more so out of good will.

Take a moment to understand the Individual using the product. Making grand gestures or, in the case of software, launching interesting new features, doesn’t make up for lacking the understanding of the Individual’s who are seeking to benefit. It is important to leverage available information on the Individual in situations like these, where you have the privilege of obtaining this data.

At MySense we recently launched a new feature that tracks an Individual’s activity, assigning a score for the level of activity where the higher the activity, the greater the score. One of the metrics we use to calculate this score is the number of steps an Individual takes in a given day. Understanding the Individual’s meant that we were aware of the fact that some of them may be limited to walking as they were restricted to a wheelchair or similar. This small insight guided our decision making to ensure the feature was inclusive to all Individuals and didn’t penalise those with walking difficulties.

Why not take a moment today to explore and really understand your benefitting Individuals, sometimes you’ll be surprised by the insights you might discover!

Written by Mohamed Beldo, Head of Data at MySense.