Design for Extreme Users

Randy Hetrick is a remarkable entrepreneur who revolutionized an incredibly crowded category, and he did it from the outside!

How did he do it? (He told the story in his remarkable “Masters of Creativity” talk, but the TLDR version:)
Not by focusing on the needs of the majority, but by meeting the needs of extreme users.

As a member of an elite team of Navy SEALs, he had a direct line of sight to an unexpected and compelling problem: some of the world’s greatest athletes — whose very lives depended on being in peak physical condition — lacked even the most rudimentary fitness gear. Unlike many professional athletes, who have access to spectacular facilities and training equipment, even on the road, the SEALS were often deployed in environments without basic necessities, let alone barbells and weight racks.

Left to his own devices, he jury-rigged a homegrown solution using some spare nylon webbing from the SEAL gear stash, and before he knew it, other SEALs were asking him for kits. That’s when he realized, “If we can meet the needs of the greatest athletes on earth with this contraption, I bet we can help many other kinds of folks trying to stay in shape on the road, too.” He came to Stanford Business School to launch his first product, the “Travel-X, the complete portable exercise.”

You might think that such stories of extreme inspiration are the exception. Actually, they are the rule.

It’s tempting to think that the best place to start is smack dab in the middle of the bell curve, where the vast majority of the population or total addressable market lives. But that’s not the case. The history of invention and innovation has taught us time and again that the best breakthroughs (even for the middle of the bell curve) come from the extremes.

As Randy says, “From the pros to the Joe’s.” That’s often how it works.

Related: Drive Innovation Through Care

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