De Amicis

Build your products with Energy, Structure, and Empathy

How to show your product’s impact using tiny graphics

Episode #13 of the Tiny Graphics Advent Calendar, published by Marius Popescu for De Amicis.

In 2004 I discovered the software build idea. Before the process would have been manual, prone to errors, stressful. All of a sudden, this part was smooth and easy.

All you had to do was to do it very slowly once and describe the process using a build tool. This tool then could be called whenever a new version was needed and it would just take over the painful process and do it for you.

What does your product do which relieves a big pain for your customer?

How could I describe in quantities the ease that this build tools bring to the developers?

  • have a new version prepared in minutes, instead of hours, and with no forgotten parts
  • get the process documented automatically, no need to write the documents for days after a new release
  • one or 15 product versions take about the same time to prepare, that was not the case when using a manual process
Growth charts module impact
Express the impact your product has on your customers by showing how they use it in ways that were not possible before (here paper growth charts are replaced by the GrowthXP integrated growth monitoring module)

When your product’s value is bigger when used more, you get to the exponential impact level

If your product is gaining time for your customers, look at the situation where two departments use it. Do the time gains accumulate, or do they multiply?

Your customer gets a chart when they use your product. They usually need it for their decision process. Could they get also get the chart as calculations in return? This could allow other uses based on the calculations they do all year long, like quality statistics, outliers, or trends of these results.

Measure the different levels your product’s value can impact your customers business and base your graphics on these measurements. This kind of graphics will also teach your customers how to use your product and get much more value from using it.

Your turn now

What is the biggest impact of your product has for your customers, and what became possible for them to do now?

Send your questions and ideas via the Tiny Graphics mailing list.

PS

The most surprising example I still recall is the automated book production of the Pragmatic Programmers. Their process retrieves the text, chapters, images, footnotes, examples, and then it testes the whole, and it produces a book. Exponential impact.