I think Elon Musk is one of the greatest innovative thinkers of our day. I also happen to think Tesla is one of the coolest companies out there based on the electric powered innovations they have been able to bring to market. To me, they’re this generation’s Apple. They may not be the very first in the market they entered, but like Apple they can take something and innovate upon it to make it the very best. Think of products such as the Tesla Roadster, Model S, Model X, Model 3, The Powerwall, Tesla solar roof, Tesla semi, etc..etc… Each of these products was not the very first of its kind, but I would argue that Tesla’s design and thought put into each of these products makes them the absolute best!
As much as I love Tesla, I feel like there’s one key component missing to the mix. Large…scale…delivery! Tesla can design, prototype, and deliver the best car, solar, or battery backup experience to showcase to users. These are models, not production products. When it comes down to delivering on their promises of end user delivery and adoption, Tesla fails.
I don’t claim to know everything there is to know about company valuations, but it in fact boggles me that Tesla is valued as high as it is, because that value doesn’t seem to be based on real/actual sales and product deliveries to their customers. Any real company needs to prove they can deliver a quality product to create value. Tesla seems to get around this because as soon as the delivery of one product, the Tesla Model 3 for example, starts falling short of initial expectations Elon Musk is ready to launch the next latest and greatest idea to the world. The Tesla Semi announcement comes to mind. Great vision, great prototype, amazing announcement, and immediate corporate pre-orders but again we’ll see how the vision translates into full scale production delivery.
“Tesla Model 3 delays may mean more cancelled reservations” Cnet
“Back to Earth: Tesla’s losses grow on Model 3 delays” abcNews
As another example, the recent launch of Elon’s personal Tesla Roadster into space was followed the next day by an announcement about possible Model 3 orders being cancelled and the financial impact of mounting delays.
I wanted to draw this comparison of Mindset to a company like Tesla because, like Tesla, we have great strategy and vision for our customers’ pain points and user experience problems we’ve been able to surface via Design Thinking. Unlike Tesla, however, we know exactly how to deliver on those pain points and Design Thinking takeaways. In fact, in the past year and a half we’ve worked with a ton of customers delivering amazing products that truly save people time and money! We’ve done a lot of design thinking workshops, and after that we’ve built a lot of real amazing solutions. Solutions that are in production for our clients saving them money over traditional processes and SAP GUI screens. Real cost savings, time savings, employee satisfaction improvements, and other incredible stories. There’s a reason our tagline is “Mindset designs remarkable for the digital enterprise”. What is missing from that statement is our impeccable ability to deliver on that promise of remarkable delivery as well!
For example, in a recent project, we designed a solution for our customer to drastically increase the amount of information available to their sales team on a mobile device, allowing them to be far more informed and productive with their customers. Not only did we deliver this project on time (within 5% of our original hours estimate) and on budget (within 1% of our original cost estimate), but we also delivered 12% MORE functionality (as measured by Story Points) than what we had outlined at the beginning. This on time, on budget delivery allowed our customer to launch into a pilot schedule with their users to gather feedback and build even more great features and value into the backlog. Oh, and did I mention that this was the FIRST Fiori application delivered at this customer, so we were starting from scratch?
In another recent example, we designed and developed a forecasting solution for a customer to reduce transportation costs. By using design thinking and agile delivery we were able to deliver the end to end project in 12 weeks and were able to lower transportation costs by almost a third at the first pilot site. All of this was delivered within 4% of the original estimate.
Let me know your thoughts? Do you think Tesla will be able to prove itself in the delivery space? If they do just that this year, they’ll take over Volvo’s current spot for annual auto production. Pretty impressive for a company that just came on the scene less than a decade ago.
Questions about a remarkable challenge you have? Curious about how we’ve delivered real ROI via user experience and design? Contact us, we’d love to jump in and start a design thinking session to get our collective design juices flowing. After that, we’ll deliver. Why? It’s just what we do!
