Product Thinking for Designers Part 3: How to Come up with Product Concepts Using the SCAMPER Method
Learn how to use the SCAMPER method to generate product ideas (and innovate on top of existing solutions).
Introductions
Once you’ve found a worthwhile market and target audience, coming up with a list of product concepts and innovative ideas can seem daunting. One of my favorite methods for this process is “SCAMPER,” which stands for substitute, combine, adapt, modify, put to another use, eliminate, and rearrange. The SCAMPER method encourages you to ask your team seven different questions to spark new ideas during an innovation or ideation session. This method is especially valuable when brainstorming ways to provide a 10x better solution and stand out from competitors.
Best Practices
To start a SCAMPER session, you must have a list of products or services with elements you may want to emulate or innovate on top of. It could be an existing product, service, or idea that you want to improve upon or adapt to your specific target market and audience.
Start going down the list of questions for each idea. You should be specific with your questions, focusing on various aspects of each idea, including values, benefits, services, touchpoints, product attributes, pricing, markets, and whatever else may be relevant. Let’s take a look at each question and discuss some examples in more detail.
Substitute
This question focuses on answering, “what can I substitute or change in an existing experience that would make it better for my target market and audience?” In order words, think about how you can substitute a part of the existing solution. For example, product innovations like Kindle, Nook, and Kobo successfully found PMF by substituting parts of the book reading experience to innovate the concept of an “e-book.” These product teams discovered they could provide significant value to their customers by providing an extremely portable and accessible reading experience.
Combine
This question focuses on answering, “what aspects of existing experiences can I combine to create a better experience for my target market and audience?” In other words, think about how you can combine several existing solutions into a single product concept. For example, in certain international markets (e.g., China), consumers prefer “all-in-one” super-apps over “single use-case” apps that are more prevalent in Western markets. Therefore apps that can “do a lot of things” like WeChat became successful by combining features from many products and providing a single cohesive experience.
Adapt
This question focuses on answering, “what can I adapt in an existing experience to make it better for my target market and audience?” For example, Notion adapted the digital note-taking experience by introducing a set of personal management features (to-dos, boards, databases, etc.) Adaptation tends to be more relevant when you notice your target audience hacking their product experience to accommodate unsupported use cases. For example, perhaps the Notion team noticed that their target audience was manually entering [] and [x] to hack together a to-do list function within their note-taking product.
Modify (Magnify or Minify)
This question focuses on answering, “what can I increase or decrease in an existing experience to create a better experience for my target market and audience?” This could take the form of magnifying a certain aspect of a product, e.g., AirTable modifying the spreadsheet experience, Trello modifying the Kanban board experience, etc. These product innovations found PMF by minifying certain non-essential aspects of existing experiences and magnifying the aspects that their target audience actually cared about.
Put to Another Use
This question focuses on answering, “what aspect of an existing experience can I put to another use?” For example, drones were originally used for taking pictures and recording videos. However, some innovative startups are using them for deliveries. Most inventions were either created with one particular use case in mind or no use case at all. Oftentimes, instead of trying to invent something brand new, you should look at existing inventions and innovations and evaluate if they can be repurposed for your use cases.
Eliminate
This question focuses on answering, “what can I remove from an existing experience to create a better experience for my target market and audience?” Think about the existing products and services your target audience uses and what aspects are high friction, don’t provide value, or can be automated? A great example is the innovation of “1-click checkout” on e-commerce. The product team probably noticed that many customers only bought one item at a time, yet they had to go through multiple screens (add to cart, confirm, checkout, etc.), which did not provide value but added a ton of friction. By eliminating those unnecessary steps, they created a better experience for customers with that particular use case.
Rearrange
This question focuses on answering, “what can I change, re-order, or reverse in an existing experience to make it better for my target market and audience?” For example, Uber rearranged the traditional taxi experience to become more efficient. The existing taxi experience was “find an available taxi → arrive at destination → pay,” Uber’s rearranged experience was “call Uber → pay → arrive at the destination.” This improved the experience, as customers didn’t have to waste time transacting with the driver once they arrived at their destination and could simply exit immediately without hassle.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the SCAMPER framework helps your team generate and iterate ideas for new product experiences. SCAMPER is an acronym formed from the abbreviation of substitute, combine, adapt, modify, put to another use, eliminate, and rearrange. SCAMPER is a powerful lateral thinking technique that challenges the status quo and helps you explore new possibilities by leveraging existing experiences.
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