Beyond, Together Summit

I was fortunate to attend the Beyond, Together Summit (hosted by TechLadies and Buzzfeed) with my fellow tech lady colleagues and it was a truly inspiring experience, and not just because of the great snack offerings at the Buzzfeed office. While every speaker brought a fresh point of view on a range of topics, I wanted to highlight the 3 takeaways that had a lasting impact on me.

1. Design Audience-First, Not Problem-First

One of the speakers highlighted that if a product is developed to only solve for a specific problem, it doesn’t account for the fact that audiences and their needs evolve. If the product doesn’t evolve with it’s audience, it can run into an issue of becoming irrelevant. By designing for the audience, you not only solve for their current problem but are able to continue meeting their needs as they change over time.

An example of a brand that has followed this path successfully is Amazon, who’s origination was selling books. If their strategy focused only on the initial problem their product solved of “users need an affordable and efficient way to purchase books”, they would have become edged out of the industry by more robust products, but because they continually focused on their audience’s needs, they were able to expand their features (from a wider range of physical products to the services included in Amazon Prime) and…