Short description: This blog article will focus on importance of customer feedback. During the following lines I will present my experiences, ways to engage customers to provide the feedback and my personal thoughts on building the product customers will love. Since my background is in IT industry, this article will be heavily based on software development but can be easily translated to other types of industries as well.
Every product starts with an idea. No matter how good the idea is, in order for the product to succeed and grow, it needs to be built for and used by customers. In its essence, it is pretty simple, customer has a problem and you have a service to make that problem disappear. During my career I’ve recognised that more often than we would like to admit it, product people tend to forget this main rule.
On the other hand, making decisions in the name of end users can certainly save a lot of time for the development team and perhaps in certain occasions can be used as a sign of great leadership and experience. However, if the product team keeps repeating this cycle over and over again it will more than likely lead to failure and greater consequences in the long run.
Let’s imagine a product is just like a nice meal we thought about while grocery shopping. With this comparison in mind, we can divide different stages of product development in the following units:
- Buying food
- Preparing food
- Cooking
- Serving
Buying food aka finding market fit
In order for an idea to become a product and potentially a business we need to find a market group that would actually benefit from it. While investigating the market, its potential and competitors one thing that is often overlooked, but really important, is finding your customer zero.
Customer zero can be interpreted in many ways, depending on the organisation size. In this article I would define customer zero as one or more real life customers that would benefit from your product and will provide you constant feedback and insights into their businesses.
How will you find this customer?
Let’s say you are building a service that will help small businesses and potential user/s are owning hair salons. You can spend hours and hours on research online, or you can realise you are in desperate need for a haircut. I would recommend the latter. Go to your local barber and chat a bit with them while they are doing your hair. This will be your most important research.
One interesting concept I’ve got from watching Y Combinator Startup Class is correlation between number of users and how much do they like your product. In the beginning of growing a successful startup it is far more important to get a small number of users that really love the product than a lot of them that just like it.
If happy, your customers will do much more for it than any paid advertising could.
Preparing food aka scoping the work
When researching you will find hundreds if not thousands of pain points for any industry. It is really important to understand what is the real problem and what’s just an inconvenience. To do so you will have to filter through these and identify clear requirements for your team. To me, this is probably the most important phase. You need to properly identify MVP.
How to do so:
- Group similar problems with common root cause
- Establish rating system which will help you to make final decisions based on facts and priority
- Prioritise functionality and simplicity over complexity
In next blog article I plan to write on different methods you can use to make decisions.
Cooking aka development phase
If everything was done properly before and we have our MVP, this is the easiest part. Couple notes before we start cooking:
- Team needs to be aligned on the goal and end product
- Cook fast and in small increments
- Add spices when needed but never change the meal mid process
Serving aka requesting feedback
There isn’t many more exciting things than having your product live and in use by customers. In agile world while we are serving the food to customers we are already preparing and working on the next meal.
While some problems and potential new features will be identified mid development we need to be aware of the trap of not listening to our customers.
It is of utmost importance to collect feedback. Remember we are in the business of making a product that the customers will love. Therefore:
- Notify your customers when a new feature is available
- Ask for their opinions and thoughts
- Motivate them to provide feedback (small reward like voucher can do wonders)
One of the best things you can do while the product is still small is to be able to contact your customers directly. They will love it and will probably forget about some bumps on the road. In the end, every product is built for customers.
I hope you enjoyed this article and found it a valuable read. Let me know your thoughts in the comments.
PS. As mentioned above, in the next blog article I plan to focus on different methods for decision making. Stay tuned.
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