Category: Travel

How train platform noodle shops can teach us about product & service differentiation

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In response to my recent article about how product managers can learn from the way Starbucks opens its stores while still under construction, several colleagues rightly pointed out that not all companies have the brand recognition and loyal customer base that Starbucks has when launching a new product or service. While I still think it’s true that the “coffee and cash register” approach that Dave Pickett summarized so well represents the “core revenue-generating loop” for a minimally viable product (MVP), basic functionality is not always enough to ensure success.

In addition to defining a well-constrained MVP that will enable you to get into the market and begin earning revenue, learning, and iterating to further improve the product, startups facing entrenched competition must fundamentally differentiate themselves rather than merely shipping a product with a subset of the competitors’ or alternatives’ features.

Now, bear with me as I stick to food & beverage analogies for a quick bowl of noodles…

I was born and raised in Japan, and I recently returned to visit friends and family there. Traveling from Tokyo to Matsumoto via Nagano, I had about 30 minutes between the bullet train from Tokyo and the express to Matsumoto, right around lunch time. As I stepped off the bullet train, the first thing that caught my eye was a small shop built on the train platform announcing “soba” (buckwheat noodles) on its blue curtains. Mountainous Nagano, where the Winter Olympics were held in 1998, is famous all over Japan for its soba, so I wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity.

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How Starbucks helps Product Managers define what a true Minimally Viable Product (MVP) is

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As a Seattleite, I’ve supported my “local coffee company” when visiting New York, Tokyo, London, and Madrid (and yes, I support independent coffee shops as well). Starbucks receives universal acclaim for its excellent customer experience, whether you take advantage of the mobile ordering system, gamified loyalty program, convenient drive-throughs, or just walk up to the counter at any store around the world. For example, I recently noticed that the partners (as the company calls its staff) had stopped asking for my name when I paid using the mobile app. Observing them in action, I saw that each station, from the espresso machine to baked goods, now printed the order stickers that had previously only appeared on mobile orders. With no more handwritten misspellings of customer names on coffee cups, late night comedians will have to find new material!

But it’s not just a well-integrated customer experience that can provide lessons for Product Management and User Experience professionals in the technology industry. One of the two Starbucks stores on my commute to work (yes, they’re across the street from each other) has been under renovation for a few weeks, and yesterday the store opened for business, even though construction was not yet complete.

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At home in the Holiest of Holies

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I’m reading archaeologist Gregory J. Wightman’s The Origins of Religion in the Paleolithic, and thinking hard about how we humans evolved over the past several million years with a “God-shaped hole” in our psyches. I haven’t found the answer yet, but Philosopher Alain de Botton suggested in a recent interview that it is culture that can serve to fill that genuine sense of void that many of us sometimes feel in our modern lives.

You only have to look at the architecture of libraries and theaters and universities that were built in the age of declining religion to understand that our ancestors sought to fill the gap by creating temples of art, temples of culture, temples of learning, where we would congregate as we had previously done in the temples of religion.

The National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London
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Traversing all 4 seasons in just 17 days

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In two weeks, I’ll be traveling again to New Zealand for work. Though the contrast will not be nearly as stark — last time, it was snowing in Seattle when I left and I hit the beach on a bright summer day in Auckland the day I arrived — I’ll be in the Southern Hemisphere for the Spring Equinox on September 22. That means that in just 17 days, I’ll spend time in all four seasons.

I made an infographic illustrating this quirk of global travel caused by the tilt of the Earth’s axis.

4 Seasons in 17 Days

EDIT: Antipodean friends inform me that Spring begins on September 1st in both New Zealand and Australia. Frankly, I find that ridiculous. Spring begins at the equinox, and isn’t something you shuffle around at the national level as though it were Daylight Savings Time. I’m sticking to my guns on this one!