Secret Sauce: Discover Yours
Secret Sauce
Design,Strategy,Honesty
Secret Sauce is what makes the magic happen at your company or with your product. When we say secret sauce, what do we mean specifically? If you asked my 4 year old, she would assume secret sauce was some magical concoction of chocolate, marshmallows, and strawberry bits probably with glitter that could make you invisible. But if you ask a business exec, they would give you an entirely different definition about the secret combination that makes their business offering the best one out there.
Is secret sauce really secret? Or is it simply good design, strategy, and being brutally honest with yourself about your offering vs. the competition? I believe that all of us are capable of creating secret sauce within our business offering, products and processes. And just like any good recipe, you must have the right ingredients and follow a process.
Questions to ask yourself when looking for your secret sauce:
What do I do?
What do my competitors do?
Why would people choose me over my competitors?
How can I make the above reason better or more engaging?
If time and money were no object what sort of experience would I want to deliver to my customers?
What journey do my customers experience when they use my product?
What are the key moments of this experience?
Can I amplify these moments?
What is 1 small thing I can do to enhance the moments I’ve outlined?
Do the aesthetics of the experience match the journey I want the customers to go on?
In order for a business or product to be successful they must do whatever it is they do really well, but in addition to this they must differentiate. What is it that gives them the edge or makes them extra valuable to their customer? In games, the secret sauce is the experience that is created by the interactions within the game. These are defined by the game world (where are you playing, narrative, visuals), the mechanics in play, the physical assets, and the rewards. Businesses can learn a lot from games when it comes to creating a secret sauce.
We all know Pac-Man. It’s a basic game of navigating the maze, eating the power-ups and avoiding the bad guys. In the day, the secret sauce of Pac-man was the novelty, the simplicity, and yet the challenge of the ever increasing difficulty of the levels. Would you believe me if I said to you that most of the first person shooter games and a large percentage of other platformer games are based on this model. And yet, even the most similar games are different. The experiences are different, the aesthetics of play within are different, the motivation to play based on rewards and social interactions are different. And yet, when you strip everything down to the bare bones foundation of the game, it will look a lot like the foundation of pac-man. What this means, is that all those games have their own secret sauce that make them awesome. They have chosen a path, a theme, a style, a specific mechanic, whatever it is they chose and committed to it, thus beginning the definition of their offering. As the product is consumed, the choices are either validated or they fail and that opens the way to pivot and tweak the recipe of your sauce.
Be brutally honest with yourself about your offering. Talk to trusted “friendlies,” as I like to call them, and really listen to what specifically they like about your product/process, listen to what they say about competitors and always be open to constructive criticism. This will help you to understand your unique position and competitive advantage. This information will help you really hone your secret sauce.
The point I want to drive home here is that it doesn’t matter what you create, you have the ability to make it special. Because of personal life experience, individual points of view and epistemologies, you are capable of designing a product and experience that is competitive and completely unique to you and your company/product. It will take time, and it will be full of challenges. However, the result will be an experience that no one can replicate because in the end we are our own secret sauce.
Author: Erin Fair