more on the little secret to product planning: cupcakes

Last week I posted this video on the Adaptive Path blog, showing the value that a cupcake mentality can bring to successful product planning:

I’ve found this cake metaphor to be a powerful concept because:

Everyone feels the pressure to get results quickly — whether the challenge is moving a business metric or responding to competition, everyone feels the need to make an impact in the near term, not just a gesture towards something that will be great in another 12 to 18 months.
However, it’s rarely clear how to also deliver something delightful — to differentiate and release something noteworthy, one of the common assumptions is that more has to be more. Cupcakes is a metaphor for thinking about what could feel complete and exciting, even if it is feature-for-feature less than another offering or substitute.
It’s easy to remember and reference — executives and staff both remember the cupcake idea. After I share the cake metaphor, I often hear references days and weeks later like, “that’s not a cupcake!”

One of the common results I’ve found from Cupcake Thinking (<— yes, I’m going there), is that a team will look longer and deeper for the things a business already does well. You’ll look for ways to leverage what’s already differentiating, then bake that into the solution. Rather than try to stretch to cover gaps that a business doesn’t address well, a team will often ignore gaps and end up embellishing the core strengths of the firm in the solution.

For example, a financial institution with a large force of financial advisors could try to compete with a digital channel as full featured as a Schwab or Fidelity. Or, in more of a cupcake mentality, it could use the digital channel to reinforce the financial advisor relationship and make the advisor’s services more evident and more valued. The latter is lower complexity, it’s valued by the client and the advisor, it’s differentiating, and it’s why the client moved to the financial institution in the first place.

And if you can’t sit through the movie, here’s the condensed one-frame summary:

the cake model of product planning