The Bigtable Way

What’s so different about the experience economy? Why do so many organizations struggle to build experiences that people truly care about?

The difference, in a nutshell, is the gap in creative control.

We’re on a mission to change that, to empower teams to create a world of great experiences from the bottom-up, across the physical and digital spaces.

Building products that people love and find useful is about more than following frameworks or roadmaps. Creating great experiences is about giving teams the freedom to explore and ideate with real customers, where teams adopt a curiosity mindset, steeped in the domain, and remain in close contact with the customer and problem space. We call this “empowering through empathy.”

Great experiences follow from great creativity

We help organizations adopt a human-centered, bottom-up product discovery model to building great products. We do this in two ways:. We lead, advise and create product strategy, optimizing a team’s creative output, and consulting on real world experiences.

What we do: Helping banks match the right banker with the right customer. Transforming the hotel booking experience by providing room-level views using Google Earth renderings. Adding empathy and simplicity to the estate care process after a loved one has passed. Helping small businesses manage their payroll as easy as a few clicks. These, we’ve made lean and real, in the real world, by fostering a radically customer-centric approach to design and innovation. View our case studies →

De-risking Creative Projects
Lean UX is the best way to find that creative gem for your product. But it’s also wildly effective at increasing the chance of success. The bottom-up approach to creative problem solving has been called “living on the edge” by Netflix’s Reed Hastings and the “messy middle” by Adobe’s Scott Belsky. To the waterfall ways of old, it does indeed seem like chaos. At Bigtable, it’s integral to how we work and getting the best ideas out there. We’re passionate about partnering with organizations to de-risk creative projects, while providing the freedom needed for innovation to take place.

It starts with small, less specialized teams, individuals who are intimately involved in the problem space and on the front lines with the customer. Dealing with complexity and uncertainty go hand in hand. Keeping teams small, who are comfortable with uncertainty, helps streamline the product discovery process and reduce collaboration headwinds. De-risking happens through frequent, smaller tests. By optimizing in this way and conducting more frequent mini-experiments, you increase the probability that your product teams uncover that illusive non-linear gain. We find that these experiments, learning by doing, act like mini-stressors that make the overall project stronger and more successful in the long run.

Innovation rarely happens without developing a lot of ideas and failing a bunch of times. The leaner you are, the more informed you are, and the more likely you are to make better product decision. Tinkering means incrementally improving with smaller, focused releases. The incremental gains in insight quickly become non-linear, similar to how tremors can build up and trigger the big one. In the long run, it’s not that one illusive (moon)shot on goal that decides whether you win or lose, but many shorter passes that ultimately lead to your goal.

Small is Beautiful
It takes a team working on a problem they understand and care about, that is willing to tinker, prototype and continually learn, that has the greatest chance of driving business outcomes.

The opposite is what happens in most large organizations. It’s common to see ever increasing team size and stakeholders, more permission-based collaboration, less freedom, and more uncertainty. All this allows leaner competitors to lap slower ones, iterate faster, and do more with less.

Taking Ideas Further
At Bigtable, we like to take the dual tract model of the incrementalist and moonshot.

The incrementalist takes the bottom-up approach that’s informed by real customers and those in close contact with them. She builds on past successes and tweaks the current experience through continuous product discovery. This builds on current successes and enhances areas where needed, and fills gaps that are missing.

The moonshot plays along simultaneously with a focus on the long game. It’s the second tract of product discovery that seeks to uncover key insights and human behavior which are then codified into the next big thing. It aims for a bigger leap, a wow experience that’s unexpected.

In short, the incrementalist is about building products based on user data: what the customer does and tells you. The moonshot is about innovating: making something that the customer wants, but doesn’t tell you.

What’s Your Next Big Thing?

Get in touch to see how we can help you get there.