By Janet Muto

Strategic product development teams include a mix of people and skills: coding, architects, usability experts, marketing and more.  Take a walk through most high tech shops and you’ll see this type of team working on the next version of their product.

But there’s one crucial person who’s missing from many strategic product development teams: your user.  

When you do not understand your users’ viewpoint, needs and desires, you risk creating, developing and launching a product that misses the mark. And when a product misses the mark in the market, it also misses revenue goals.

To create a successful product, you need to give your user a role in the product development process – in the entire development process.  From the initial idea through to commercialization.  You need to ask questions, ask the right questions, listen to the feedback and incorporate it into your product.

Giving your user a role in product strategy is much more than having an executive with one or two “important” customers, and it is much more than a conversation at your annual users group meeting.  It’s a formalized and systematic approach to continually incorporate, assess and act upon users needs.

Here are my tips on adding your user to your product strategy team:

1)    Listen.  You can’t listen enough to what your customer wants and needs.  Today there are many different ways to listen to your customer, such as:

a) In-person focus groups

b) Follow a customer home

c) Phone and online surveys

d) Customer support calls

e) Crowdsourcing

2)    Ask questions.  Have you ever taken a survey and felt like it asked you the same questions, but used different language?  That’s a key component of survey methodology you should incorporate into your listening.  Asking questions in different ways often yields different answers.  Similarly, different methods of listening (such as those listed above) can yield different answers.

3)    Focus on customer use cases not product recommendations.  The “faster horse” quote attributed to Henry Ford does have value (“If I asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse” – Henry Ford.)  The key, is to understand what your users and customers are looking for…in this case, the answer is faster…not necessarily a horse!

4)    Dig Deep. Don’t confuse a response with an answer.  Once you have responses and feedback from customers, you need to take a deep dive into that data.  Look at the data from a quantitative perspective.

5)    Collect and merge the data. User and customer data is valuable – especially when collected and synthesized/analyzed across organizations.  I’ve worked with many companies who talk to customers (via executive visits), customer support (when calls come in) and product (usability), but don’t really work to put all the pieces together.

6)    Understand the risk of not listening.  Listening to your customers is a concerted and consistent effort.  It could be easy to dismiss the time, effort and resources needed to listen to your customers.  But it would be a tremendous risk.  In the worst case scenario, it means risking failure.

Are you willing to risk your product failing by your failure to listen to your users?

– Janet

@janetmuto
@highstartgroup