Concept to code process

Designing a digital bank involves using design thinking to ensure that you are extremely customer-focused and understand the customers’ jobs to be done and the issues they face getting them done. Instead of specifying all the requirements at the start, work is simultaneously being specified, reviewed from the standpoint of multiple stakeholders, and refined. The output is tested, put into beta or production, or further refined to pass all required checks for quality before being put into production. This, in essence, is what Agile is all about.

Phase I: Design Focus

There are four interrelated actions in this phase: Business viability and design considerations are fed by observations and ideas that you can translate to insights about how the product or service helps the customer or how the business model improvement helps the bank.

Most people think that this phase is exclusively customer-oriented, but in fact it also needs to be business-oriented so that you create value that customers are willing to pay for, at a cost that can generate a profit.

Business viability is about alignment to the bank’s business objectives, the revenue and profit, the cost structure, the timeframe and horizon, the long-term strategy. This needs to be aligned with the customer value proposition, which is derived from observations about the jobs the customers want to do and the difficulties they have doing them, plus new ideas about how they can be done better. In both the observations and ideas boxes, the translation into insights is crucial. This is an often-misunderstood part of the method. The best definition is, “An insight is a penetrating observation about consumer behaviour that can be applied to unlock growth.” Insights allow you to uncover problems that customers have in performing their jobs and to eliminate these pain points.

The output of Phase 1, design considerations, captures the key design elements of your offering after balancing solutions to customer problems by considering the key drivers or insights in mind, and business viability and feasibility.

The first phase of the factory process culminates in the documentation of the product, service and business model requirements. Note that the four action boxes – business viability, observations, ideas and design considerations – can affect each other. If an idea is found to be too difficult to translate into a profitable innovation, the idea should be dropped, and you will need more observations or ideas that generate insights to progress.