Mini-case study: How do you run a human-centered technical exploration on a hard-to-access emerging technology?

A few years back, I worked with a consumer robotics team seeking out new use cases for their product.

This scenario comes up fairly often in emerging tech: you build a product thinking there’s a market, only to find that interest is not as robust as you thought, and sales quickly plateau.

This leaves you with two options: give up, or pivot.

This team asked me to help them identify alternative markets for their product.

The process

Coming in as a third party, I needed to quickly assess the full technical capabilities of the product and the team, so that I could match that to potential customers.

In a perfect world, we would have had weeks to conduct extensive material exploration, but this project had two critical constraints:

• 🚫 A very short timeline

• 🚫 No availability of prototypes or production models to test with

So instead, I focused our investigation on two areas:

• 🦾 Interviewing the engineers who designed and maintained the robots

• 🦾 Reviewing the team’s existing patents (because, built or not, this was part of their moat)

This allowed us to identify several key differentiators, as well as important constraints in how their product functioned (or could function).

But when you’re talking to engineers and reading patents, you come away with capabilities articulated very much in engineering (not human) terms.

So I also included a separate step in the process to translate these technical specifications into “razors” that made sense in the context of human workflows. These razors became the criteria we later used to evaluate new potential markets.

How it worked

Would a deeper technical exploration have been preferable? Sure. But the exploration we did still produced valuable criteria that surfaced new target customers and use cases the team hadn’t considered before.

This approach can work for other types of technology as well, especially when you have trouble getting access to unwieldy or expensive prototypes for testing.

Are you struggling to find the right customer for an emerging technology product, or do you know someone who is?

A human-centered technical exploration can be a great starting point for discovering new markets.

I’d love to help–let’s talk.