I recently talked with a brilliant startup co-founder that relies on a highly specialized supply to deliver a differentiated service. Things are going well for them now, and they are looking to scale. The bottleneck, not surprising, is scaling the supply while keeping the demand's satisfaction level the same.
While from the dawn of history, tools & machines augmented humans and enhanced their productivity. Automation is increasingly peeking at jobs requiring more complex and less routine skills. It is only accelerating due to COVID. And, I think it's an exciting trend, I wanted to share a few lessons from experts.
Rory Sutherland: Map out the entire value created, don't fall prey to the 'Doorman Fallacy.'
In his book Alchemy, Rory defines the doorman fallacy by giving this example:
"You define a hotel doorman's role as 'opening the door,' then you replace his role with an automatic door-opening mechanism... The problem arises because opening the door is only the notional role of a doorman.... in addition to door-opening: taxi-hailing, security, vagrant discouragement, customer recognition, and signaling the status of the hotel. The doorman may actually increase what you can charge for a night's stay in your hotel."
You need to carefully think about how the end-to-end experience creates value for consumers, including the functional service itself, the 'hospitality,' what goes beyond the minimum, & 'signaling.' Don't fall prey to the Doorman Fallacy.
Peter Thiel: Understand the strengths of humans & machines
Peter Thiel wrote in his (highly recommended!) Zero to One book: "men and machines are good at fundamentally different things... We form plans and make decisions in complicated situations... Computers are exactly the opposite: they excel at efficient data processing, but they struggle to make basic judgments."
My daughter recently started using Stitch Fix, which prides itself on combining data science and human judgment stylists to deliver a new shopping experience. The machines algorithmically curate a set of items from millions of options as a starting point. Stylists apply judgment based on their familiarity with the customer, especially if they change style, and put together a Fix in under 15 minutes.
Rishi Mandal: Give Humans the Right Tools & Evaluate
Future built the largest body of professional trainers (after the US army). Rishi, Co-Founder and CEO, talks about some of the tools they are using to scale the coaches' interactions:
- The Workout Builder saves coaches time doing the "IQ" part of coaching — recommending and making it easy for coaches to build exercises & goal tracking.
- The Command Center enhances the "EQ" part of coaching — CRM for customer details, communication tools with apple watch snippets, workflow & task management.
- Evaluation system includes functional components that are measurable like response time and evaluation criteria for the "EQ" part based on sample communication.
The tools are getting better, but as one coach puts it: "adding new tasks and responsibilities every time a minor improvement in tooling is made results in a net-zero improvement in work/life balance." So the tools improve, but coaches are asked to do more.