vs. SurveyMonkey
Qualtrics
Sophisticated research, self-serve, for academics
- What it did
- Founded 2002 by a BYU marketing-research professor and son
- SurveyMonkey
- A free tool for anyone who needed a survey (1999)
Democratize the Expert Task
What does “Democratize the Expert Task” mean?
A shipped design choice removes a skill or specialist training that the alternative required, so people without that expertise can do the task themselves: templates instead of code, a web-style API instead of a telecom project, a schema-less model instead of database administration.
How it works
Removing the expert requirement enlarges the set of people who can buy and use the product, often reaching customers the incumbent never served. The design choice has to be concrete; a lower price or a free tier alone widens access for other reasons.
How companies won with Democratize the Expert Task
From the win chains in Strategy Canon case studies: what the winner did, and what its rival did at the same step.
vs. Trulia
Zillow
Zestimate: a value on every home
- What it did
- Found in a failed 2005 home-auction test; launched February 2006 with estimates on ~40M homes
- Trulia
- Map search over crawled for-sale listings (2005)
vs. Akamai · 2004–10
Cloudflare
Cloud firewall switched on by a DNS change
- What it did
- Prince and Holloway ran Project Honey Pot (from 2004; 100,000+ members) on donated DNS records
- Akamai
- Enterprises bought hardware and contracted with a CDN
vs. Qlik · 2003–12
Tableau
VizQL: drag-and-drop visual queries over data customers already have
- What it did
- VizQL, from the founders' Stanford Polaris research, turned drag-and-drop gestures into queries run live against the customer's own databases, no SQL needed (Desktop, Dec 2003)
- Qlik
- Qlik's innovation was an in-memory associative engine: developers wrote load scripts to pull data into it and built the apps
Also tagged: Adobe · Canva · Certara · Expedia · Twilio
The question to ask of a company
Which users gained access, which skill did the alternative demand of them, and which shipped design choice removed that requirement?
Who names it
| Author | What they call it / where it appears |
|---|---|
| Jeff Lawson + | Developer experience; API-first communications |
| Christensen | Simpler, more accessible offerings for non-consumers |
Note. Price, a free tier, hosting or faster setup alone do not count. When the benefit is fewer steps for users who already had the skill, use Ease of Use. The alternative must have required the skill, shown by a named rival or prior workflow.