Customer-centric product development has gained great recognition as a critical strategy for companies aiming to create successful and sustainable products. A lot of famous companies like Stripe or AirBnB focused their product development around customer needs from day one.
While there is already a huge agreement in the product world, that customer-centricity is an important factor for reliable long-term business success, a truly customer-centered product development process is quite rare in most companies.
This article will provide you with everything you need to know to understand what it means to be truly customer-centered and how you can become more user-centered in your team.
Customer-centric product development is an approach that places the customer and their needs at the center of your product development process. To become customer-centered you first need a deep understanding of your target audience, their needs, pain points, and preferences. This knowledge should then be used to guide product decisions and improvements.
Instead of relying on internal ideas and the gut feeling of someone within the company, a customer-centric approach counts on continuous user feedback and insights to make product decisions. In fact, in new customer-centric product development, all new features should be based on real user needs.
When you prioritize your customers' needs and preferences, you are more likely to identify user experience issues and unmet pain points your product is currently ignoring. This makes it more likely to improve customer experience and satisfaction over time. Furthermore, as you frequently ask users for feedback they feel involved and valued more which by itself improves satisfaction already.
As you base your assumptions on real customer data, you can identify potential issues and mitigate them early in the development process. This reduces the risk of investing time and resources in a product or feature that is not wanted or needed by your target audience. Note that you should not take feature requests by users as they usually know what problems they have but they don't know the best way to solve them.
If your product development process is not based on data to decide which feature to build next it can be hard to determine the importance of each product feature. While there are plenty of prioritization frameworks, focusing on impact for the user is usually already a great start.
It is a natural part of product development that some features or ideas fail to be adopted by the end user. Nevertheless, it should be your goal to minimize waste while staying innovative. Deeply understanding the reason why the feature is important to the user cuts waste significantly. This reason alone will make the user research efforts worth your time.
A customer-centric team benefits from a clear focus. Everyone knows why something is needed and it is based on facts. This can resolve or avoid discussions about the development direction or prioritization. The clear process and the constant feedback from the customers create a general positive feeling in the team.
While the benefits of customer-centric product development are compelling, it's essential to acknowledge the potential challenges and situations where it might not be the best fit for your organization.
Implementing a customer-centric approach often requires more resources upfront, including time, and money. If you or your organization lacks these resources, it may be challenging to execute it effectively. If you feel like there is no time or money to do it effectively, still try to get some feedback with one of these quick methods.
Transitioning to a customer-centric mindset isn’t something one person can do. It needs to be done on a team level or ideally on an organizational level. Resistance to change from within can make it almost impossible to successfully implement a user-focused strategy.
Not all products are created equal in terms of the need for innovation. In some cases, you can create products that exist almost in the same way already hundreds of times. An e-commerce store, an agency, or a blog might not need as much user input as there are so many competitors with proven success that can be used as role models. Still, I would advise everyone to talk to your potential customers but in rare cases, it is not as crucial.
If you already heard about the product-centric development approach you might wonder what the differences between these two approaches are. As it turns out, they are quite similar because the customer-centric approach can be seen as one of the three pillars of the product-led approach.
According to Bruce McCarthy, the product-centric approach combines user needs with technical feasibility and business viability.
In the end, this needs to be done anyway in a customer-centric approach as you shouldn’t build features that don’t fit into your business strategy or are very costly to build, from a technical standpoint.
Product-centric includes prioritization of customer feedback into the framework. While this absolutely makes sense I would argue that the three pillars aren't equally important and first and foremost a team should focus on the user.
Transitioning to a customer-centric product development approach seems easy but needs a deliberate and strategic effort. The following list should help to consider the most important factors to become truly customer-centric:
To truly understand your customers, start by delving deep into the problem space. This means leaving all your ideas and solutions behind to focus on the pure user needs. You need to master research in the problem space and know how to conduct in-depth interviews, surveys, and observational research to uncover insights.
Customers for example often provide solutions (feature requests) rather than expressing the underlying problems they want to solve. Instead of immediately implementing these requests, focus on understanding the problems they represent. Use the 5-Why method to understand the underlying need.
While user research projects are needed to focus on specific areas you need to find multiple ways to gather feedback. There are countless ways to make user feedback part of your product identity and it highly depends on the usage patterns of your users. If your customers use your product frequently and are emotionally invested it is great to have community-based communication channels, like:
No matter if your users use your product frequently or are emotionally invested, there are several low-barrier one-time touchpoints, like:
As you will focus on collecting data and getting feedback, you need a process to analyze and use the insights in your development process. Organizing, analyzing, and interpreting is a difficult first step, especially if you have multiple constant feedback channels. Make sure no data stays untouched or stop collecting it.
The second part of insights management is setting up a process to measure the impact of new features and the change of feedback over time. Make sure to set up a validation process before building the feature to make sure you don’t just focus on the next issue without validating you solved the users’ problem.
If you want to be truly customer-centric you need to consider how you want to estimate the importance of each development step in accordance with your knowledge about the user. If you never think deliberately about this step you will have your own opinion as a bias in every product decision.
Moving to a customer-centric approach requires a fundamental change in attitude and organizational culture. It's not simply about conducting research and getting feedback. Ensure that everyone in your team and ideally in your organization understands the significance of customer-centricity.
If you don’t get everyone involved you cannot commit to a framework to create ideas and prioritize them. Someone from higher management could just come up with an idea and pressure your team into developing something without any connection to actual user feedback. Or your team starts a brainstorming session to find new ideas that could be “cool” to implement.
In my opinion, this is often the hardest part for product managers as they first need to regain their independence as enablers for product innovation and development instead of being a Backlog Manager, who is measured by feature output instead of product impact. If you need help with that step I highly recommend David Pereira who is an absolute expert in the field.
Transparency is a double-edged sword that should be used with care. But if you ask your customers for frequent feedback, they deserve to be informed about the product development process. By involving users in the process after they give their input, you will build trust and potentially gain vocal advocates for your product.
On the other hand, there is always the risk of making your users feel unheard if you deprioritize their wishes. Find a way to communicate the development direction and future feature updates in an empathetic and positive manner. Don’t be shy of mentioning missteps as your users will notice them anyway.
By adopting a customer-centric product development strategy, you build the foundation for long-term product success. By putting your customers at the forefront of your product development efforts, you will reduce development risk, and create a more precise product development process that will ultimately benefit the satisfaction of your users as well as your team. There are almost no reasons why your company should avoid user-centric development. However, it is not easy to become a customer-centric company.
The most common reason why companies fail in their effort is either a lack of expertise to gather valuable and reliable insights or a lack of willingness from someone with the company to change old patterns. It is cucial to understand what is needed to become truly user-focused, to actively tackle all challenges you might face.
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