Don’t Reinvent Well-Oiled, Performance Tuned Wheels

An area where a lot of organizations experience challenges or entirely fall flat is reinventing wheels that work well and are already familiar to their stakeholders.

Let’s consider a resort where my family and I are on holiday this week.

They offer an app for iOS and Android that offers a few features:

•  An agenda of daily programming
• View hours of restaurants, bars, and à la carte amenities
• Make and view features to request services (e.g. additional towels, room maintenance issue)
• View a map of the resort as a zoomable image

Sadly, their app is rated under 3 stars on both mobile app stores.

And frankly, it probably deserves this rating due to glitchy user experience and language translation issues if you were to compare it to a modern app like Airbnb, a social platform, or something else made with deep budgets for agencies or in house engineers.

But there’s on feature they didn’t try to stuff into their app (or it was cut because of being lower priority): messaging.

Instead, they use WhatsApp to communicate between employees and stakeholders.

Here’s why their approach is genius:

1. Familiarity: a majority of their prospective and existing customers already use WhatsApp
2. Accessibility: practically anyone can use this across any major device platform
3. Breadth: features like voice and photo messaging, plus the ability to translate messages between languages makes it easy to cater to guests and employees with varying degrees of fluency and literacy

If you’re staring at a list of features and some of those look like you’re trying to reinvent high functioning wheels, one technique to consider is using the MSCW prioritization framework.

TLDR: Don’t reinvent wheels that work well and are familiar. Embrace and integrate what already exists, especially if you’re constrained or have a history of rocky delivery.