7a. Kicking off Customer Needs

Alright, you are familiar with the concept of Product-Market fit, Opportunities, the problem space, and solution space. Hell yeah. Feels good, doesn’t it?

The next topic to dive into is customer needs.

Emphasis on the Customer

As discussed a few weeks ago, a great Product Development system (product development strategy and product development life cycle) is focused on the customer.

Value is the whole ballgame when it comes to PD, and since Value equals Benefits minus Cost, a good product must deliver significant benefits in order to provide significant value.

“You can only deliver benefits to a consumer if you know the consumer well.” Someone important probably said this, and you should believe it.

Here’s a cartoon that helps sum up this approach to consumer-centric product development.

Source

In order to cover customer needs at a high level, I’m going to introduce you to these concepts:

• Design Thinking
• Voice of the Consumer
• Outcomes and Jobs to be Done
• Product Discovery

These are four seriously important concepts in Product Development. Buckle up; it’s going to be a big chapter. (Actually, it’s going to be many chapters as we dive deeper.)

Here is a list of the books/topics we’ll be drawing on most:

Change by Design — Design Thinking is all about getting out into the world and using empathy to put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Design Thinking also advocates Anthropology, which is literally the study of human beings. By having empathy for his or her customer, a product designer can identify the true needs of his or her potential customers.

Winning at New Products — Like most product development books, Winning covers a lot about how to truly understand customer needs. It also provides a really good primer on voice of the consumer.

The Lean Startup and Four Steps to the Epiphany — You need to talk to your customers. Get out of the building.

What Customers Want — The title of this book should be the first clue that it has some relevance here as we discuss customer needs. Tony Ulwick does a good job of covering Jobs to be Done and how customers evaluate product performance with “outcomes.”

Oh yeah, and I thought I would remind you of where we’ve come from and where we’ll go from here.

Chapter 1: Intro

Chapter 2: The PD process, definitions, methodologies

Chapter 3: Characteristics of good PD, metrics, the team, and customer value

Chapter 4: Marketing 101

Chapter 5: Strategy 101

Chapter 6: Product Market Fit and Opportunities

Chapter 7: Customer Needs [YOU ARE HERE]

Chapter 8: Design Thinking

Chapter 9: Jobs to be Done

Chapter 10: What Customers Want

Chapter 11: The Fuzzy Front End

7b. Voice of the Customer

Let’s talk about Voice of the Customer, but before doing so, here’s an important disclaimer.

[Disclaimer!]

In this chapter, I am using the terms “consumer” and “customer” interchangeably. This technique is sloppy, and I wish I weren’t doing it, but I am. The reason is that the term “voice of the customer” is so common. Ultimately, one needs to please both the customer (buyer) and consumer (end-user), but it’s annoying to write “voice of the customer/consumer” over and over, so just deal with this imprecision.

The term “Voice of the Customer” (which some nerds abbrev as VOC, myself included) is an extremely broad concept.

I think of it as describing the philosophy that your product should be designed with consideration for what your customer needs and wants.

Voice of the Customer — the philosophy of designing products with customer needs and wants in mind.

Within the broad philosophy of Voice of the Customer, there are many more narrow concepts — empathy, anthropology, getting out of the building, etc. In fact, Chapter 6 of Winning at New Products provides an entire list of concepts that fall within “voice of the customer:”

Voice of Customer Concepts

• Ethnography, or “camping out”
• Customer visits
• Focus groups
• Lead-user analysis
• A customer brought in to help design product
• Community of enthusiasts
• Customer advisory board
• Customer brainstorming

Hopefully, some of these look familiar. They are all techniques for understanding your customers better.

To keep it simple today, I’m leaving it here with these Key Takeaways:

• Voice of the Customer is about designing products with consideration for customer needs, preferences, expectations, desires, wants, aversions, likes, dislikes . . . you get it.
• Voice of the Customer can be accomplished in many different ways.

7c. Voice of the Customer Terms Defined

There is so much on this topic that I need to include a post that covers all the various terms used to describe it. Here goes:

Voice of Consumer — Generic term to describe any need, desire, or other preference as described from the perspective of the user, and in a larger sense, it is used to describe the whole process of determining those preferences, expectations, etc.; it is not when you make a puppet to represent the consumer and then mockingly speak for them, which can be funny for your coworkers, but is not very productive.

Market Research — To some extent, Market Research and Voice of the Customer are very similar concepts. Both seek to understand the customer; Market Research just goes beyond the customer and analyzes the entire market (competitor products, prices, market dynamics). So most Voice of the Customer activities can be considered Market Research, but not all market research is VoC #venndiagram.

Customer Discovery — Learning about your customer’s needs figuring out what to build and why.

Four Questions for Customer Discovery — “Have we identified a problem that a customer wants to have solved? Does our product solve these customer needs? If so, do we have a viable and profitable business model? Have we learned enough to go out and sell?” (From Four Steps to the Epiphany.)

Design Thinking — A design philosophy that is user-centric (or human-centered) more than anything, and a design process that emphasizes deep understanding of consumer behavior and ideation-prototyping loops.

Anthropology — The study of people; a mindset taken in Design Thinking where you observe people’s behavior with an inquisitive or beginner’s mind.

Empathy — Describes putting yourself in another’s shoes, particularly to gain a deep understanding of the consumer or user’s needs and experience. Discussed a lot in Design Thinking but really emphasized in all PD methods.

Observation — Really watching what someone does; people will often unintentionally explain their behavior in a way that contradicts what they actually do, so surveying them can produce inaccurate results.

Get Out of the Building — Exactly what it means; get out and see what’s happening with your consumers, your market, and the way consumers are interacting with products; “there are no facts inside the building, only opinions.” (Good article on this).

We’re going to cover a lot of these in more depth. Not all of them, but each is worth knowing. This is not a memorization challenge; as you read the next few chapters, you will learn these concepts well organically (Thanks Product Development Distillery!).

7d. Discovery — Another Term for Voice of the Customer

A lot of modern writing on product development will use the term Discovery. This is especially prominent in the Lean Startup and Agile domains.

Voice of the Customer — Bringing the customer’s needs to light during product development.

Discovery — Bringing the customer’s needs to light during product development.

Sure, some people will get a bit worked up about my calling these two things the same thing. For those who have worked in PD for decades and read all the books, there are distinctions worth noting.

But here is what I say to those people: relax, you nerd.

For all intents and purposes, these things are really quite similar.

To: Design Thinking, Discovery, Voice of the Customer.

Can’t you all see that there is so much more that unites you than divides you? It all comes down to understanding the customer better. Aren’t you sort of just different versions of the same thing? Also, what are you all doing this weekend? Want to hang out?

From, Product Development Distillery

More on Discovery

Discovery is about truly knowing and understanding your customers and their needs.

Considering that the goal of all products in every market and industry is to provide value for the customer, you can appreciate how universally important Discovery is, no matter your industry or product type.

Discovery gets talked about in Design Thinking. Design Thinkers use empathy and anthropology (studying people) to discover their customers true needs and wants.

Discovery also gets talked about in Agile. Agile folks love focusing on the customer and iterating until the customer needs are fulfilled.

And Discovery sure as shit gets discussed in Lean Startup writing because those mofos pretty much invented the term. I provide a few resources at the bottom for further reading.

I’ll admit that there are a variety of different methods for discovering customer needs, and not all methods are created equal. Finding the right method is probably the secret sauce (which is an apt phrase, because McDonald’s surely understood customer needs when they put that delicious sauce on their burgers.)

We’ll share some methods for Discovery in upcoming posts.

Sources:

The Four Steps to the Epiphany is the best book I’ve found on Discovery. Start here.

This website is also excellent: producttalk.org

7e. JTBD, Outcomes, and Design Thinking vis a vis Customer Needs!

We’ve already covered Voice of the Customer and Discovery…what more could there be to talk about with respect to customer needs?!

Actually, since understanding what people want is so universally important in product development, there are a shit-ton (i.e., many) frameworks or schools of thought for how to approach that challenge.

Remember, understanding customer needs is key to delivering value, and delivering value to customers is what innovation is all about, and product development is successful when you deliver new value. (They say people only hear something after it’s repeated 11 times; I think I’m getting there on the whole customer needs and value topic.)

Design Thinking — Another Approach to Understanding Customer Needs

Design Thinking is about putting human beings at the center of the design process.

Design Thinking is a value system and an approach to designing products.

Design Thinking Values: being human-centric, having empathy, creating a deep understanding of people.

Design Thinking Approach: emphasis on fast-learning, iterating, prototyping, failing quickly.

Clearly, you can see the overlap with Voice of the Customer and Design Thinking — both seek to understand the customer well.

Jobs to be Done — Another Approach to Understanding Customer Needs

There is a very popular school of thinking that says, “If you want to understand customer needs and design better products, think out it this way: people don’t buy products to fill needs, they hire products to do jobs.”

When you buy a book, you aren’t filling your need for learning so much as you are hiring that book to teach you about a topic.

You don’t buy that sandwich to meet your need for hunger so much as you hire that sandwich to eliminate your hunger. You don’t buy that game app for your phone so much as you hire that app to amuse you in the check-out line.

The distinction is subtle, but as we dive into it more in the coming weeks, you’ll see that it’s a cool framework that can be a better approach to understanding needs.

Outcomes — Another Approach to Understanding Customer Needs

Lastly, there is yet one last approach to understanding customer needs that I think is worth knowing.

Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI) is a system for focusing on what results or “outcomes” users expect from their products, and designing to maximize the benefit derived from important yet underserved outcomes.

Outcomes are related to the Jobs to be Done approach. If you hire someone to do a job, you would likely be able to assess how well they did that job be evaluating a few outcomes (how fast did it get done, how well, how enjoyable was it to work with someone, how communicative were they throughout the process).

Outcome-Driven Innovation systematically identifies these outcomes, assesses which are most important, and pushes product developers to create products that improve outcomes.

In Summary

Wow, that was a meaty section. Key takeaways here:

Voice of the Customer is ultimately a term that captures trying to bring the customer’s needs into light during product development.

Since this is such a universally important thing to do, there are plenty of other frameworks/terms/methods for doing it: Discovery, Jobs to be Done, Outcomes, Design Thinking.

More on these topics to come!