Value Proposition
What hammer are we selling, to which man, and for what nail?
Our definition
When talking about a Value Proposition we mean the essential, singular benefit that we offer to our clients and that they are prepared to reward us for. Although it feels like we are quite specialised at Picket the reality is that we are doing a spectrum of things at once, like:
giving advice on how to make better decisions with technology,
building things using our technical knowledge,
helping clients understand how to use their products and tools,
helping brainstorm or invent new product solutions, or
maintaining systems so that they stay reliable.
Each of those products could be framed in a unique Value Proposition (or tool) that a client may find easy to relate to and highly valuable, such as:
strategy,
implementation,
training,
consulting, and
quality assurance.
Finally, you can see that each of these activities could describe a stand-alone business selling a specialised product, such as, respectively:
"helping clients make better tech decisions",
"building high quality, cost-effective software",
"creating high-functioning teams through technology training",
"design thinking that generates the best ideas for your business", or
"fail-proof customer experience through rigorous platform maintenance".
At Picket, our aim is to find, define and refine our Value Proposition so that we can be sure that we're offering the most valuable thing to the most valuable clients.
Living & breathing
Importantly, our Value Proposition needs to be based on a genuine ability to deliver and be highly competitive. There's no point saying that we offer a product that we don't genuinely believe we can do better than the other guys all else being equal—and with a healthy margin to boot.
The thing that we care about most, and know about most, is "the web". We know how it works, why it works, what it's doing and how to harness its power for the good of our clients. We live, breath and ruthlessly study it every day because we are simply driven to do so.
We're obsessed, and that obsession is what we must use to give us our advantage: to build a depth of knowledge and a competence in execution that leaves other agencies in the dust.
FOMO
We feel that it's important to frame our Value Proposition as something you can miss out on. A true test of how valuable something is, is how much pain someone feels if and when they don't have it. We want to focus on the most "missable" thing that we can.
In our circle of concern, the thing that is most universally missed out on is the exponential growth in value that the industry's most successful players have enjoyed since the dawn of the public, commercial web.
We know and understand that this incredible growth in value hasn't come from the hardware, the software, the chips, bits and bytes—it's come from the connectedness that the web creates between people, liberating communication and interaction from the constraints of time and physicality, making them networked and asynchronous.
Most of the underlying technology (which we have an intimate understanding of, by the way) hasn't changed much during this time of growth. What has changed is the number of people coming online and interacting with each other, with barriers to that interactivity being removed by reduction in the cost of hardware, propagation of networks and general removal of barriers for people to get online and get involved.
What we want to get across is that the spoils of this growth aren't just for those people who happened to buy Apple stocks in the 80s. These are just the celebrity stocks that get all the attention.
Anyone can capture this global growth phenomenon in their business and be in one of the boats that is lifted by the rising tide, and guess what? We are the boat-builders.
Spinning the web
Through our passion for the web, and a deep understanding of its structure, its culture, its present and its future we offer our clients an opportunity to sail on the winds of change that power the world’s most successful public companies and institutions.
This statement articulates the fact that we're not just selling technical skill, but true insight. We are offering our clients a chance at success, not just a place to offload predefined work.
A simplified version, more tailored for public consumption called, could be:
Put the web to work. Companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, Netflix and Amazon have all sailed to success on the growth in web technologies—and so can you.
The Pillars
We believe that the web Zeitgeist rests on a few important pillars, and our expertise in each is the basis for our ability to deliver on our proposition.
Open Source Software
The Open Source software movement has allowed millions of developers to collaborate globally on solving common problems, capturing value for others to integrate in their solutions.
Competencies
Arctic Vault 2020 Github contributors
React and React Native experts
Client and server-side JavaScript experts
Fluent in Git, Node, TypeScript, etc.
100% open source development since 2007
Distributed Computing
The gradual improvement of networking speeds and mobile device uptake has allowed users to have a permanent connection between their palm and Palo Alto, gaining access to instant supercomputer power and big data through cloud services.
Competencies
API design and implementation
GraphQL experts
Database design
Testing
AWS, Heroku, Zeit, Continuous Integration, Deployment Pipelines
DNS, database & server administration
Social Networks
Social networks continue to evolve and (big and small) dominate as the primary mode of web interaction for most of the planet's people. Society is moving online, removing the barriers of time and place from relationships.
Competencies
Closed social network ASTAR.tv for University of Sydney
Facebook Messenger Bot Esther
Private project: Placemark
Mobile
Ever improving access to cheaper and better smartphones and other portable, networked devices bought billions of people online in the last decade, and a greater and greater proportion of their interactions will continue to go digital as connection speeds improve and services are ported to the online environment.
Competencies
React Native
Deployment pipelines
Honesty Box app
Productisation
One of the greatest limiting factors in the growth of commercial online services has been the ability of organisations to adapt fast enough to keep up with the opportunity. For most service and product providers the obstacles are not slow connections or a lack of hardware—its their own inability to effectively design and build experiences that meet the expectations of their users—a level expectation that continues to rise.
Competencies
Product design background
Branding experience & partnerships
Human-centred research and design methodology
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