Get your product „just right“ with focus group tests
Essence of the Article:
Focus group tests can give valuable customer feedback during development stage. Three factors are vital for success: It is important to set the right scenarios, the right focus group and the right insights to feed back into your backlog.
It is in our nature: The urge to to create the best possible solutions for our customers. After we found problems worth solving we want to successfully fix them.
But how do we make sure we understood the needs correctly?
There are several ways to get to the important answers during the product development. They are immensely valuable to correct our product’s course. The earlier the correction, the cheaper it is — and the better the end result:
- “Are we building the right thing?”
- “Are we building it in a way the customer likes to use it?”
- “Are we building it with the customer process in mind?”
Today, we’ll focus on the most crucial of those:
Doing the right things.
For that we’ll want to talk to our customers.
Only their unfiltered feedback will be helpful. One of the methods to get structured and usable feedback are focus group test.
A successful focus group test leans on three core activities:
1. Select the right business scenarios
2. Select the right customers for our focus group
3. Select the right insights to feed back to our development backlog
1. The right business scenarios
Why is that important
A business scenario describes how our product will solve a core need of our customer. We usually select a scenario which focuses on the one customer pain or need that overshadows all others.
This is also the need we’ll put into our solution’s elevator pitch later.
How do we do it
Think about the core features we put into the product backlog — The ones with the highest priority.
Of those core features we select the ones which feed into solving the “core pain” of our customer. For example, we don’t focus on the login process but rather on the value adding process of selecting a hotel and making a booking.
With this user journey in mind, we piece together the puzzle how our customer will solve his main problem with our solution.
But we don’t know all the steps yet…
So, how do we handle “white spots” in the business scenario? As in: “we know there needs to be xyz but as of today we’re not sure how to solve that in technical terms”.
Simple, we acknowledge them and mark them as “technical concept to be defined”.
Our focus group customers might inquire about the plan. But this we can use to get some input how they would like to see the blank space solved.
How do we know we’ve done it right
The steps in our user journey are focused on steps we can actively influence in development. Steps we can’t influence will be listed under “business scenario prerequisites/assumptions”.
2. Select the right customers
Why is that important
With the right customers in our group we are sure to address the right core need. So, we’ll look for some representative people that fit the focus customer profile.
How do we do it
I always like to check with possible interview candidates whether
- They work in the setting where we see our customer journey
- They currently struggle with the journey we want to test
How do we know we’ve done it right
We aim to get homogenous feedback — read: answers that are quite close to each other. When we get contradicting feedback we need to review whether we selected customers out of different target groups.
3. Feed back into backlog
Why is that important
The goal of testing is to validate and enhance the backlog
But: Not everything that is said can be pulled back into backlog
Otherwise you’ll bloat it with wishes of single customers
How do we do it
As in the interviews we did for customer need discovery, we always ask about the need behind the feedback.
During the interview we try to focus on getting feedback for the current release. For any ideas and wishes the customer might bring up we simply note them down and mark them accordingly.
In the interview retrospective we cluster the feedback in:
- Must-have for upcoming release
- Nice-to-have, maybe for next releases
- Other topics that came up and are on the mind of the customer
After we concluded our interviews we prioritize the feedback. This we can do by how many times it came up in different interviews and the perceived value across the interviews.
Feed back requirements into your backlog after being sure they sharpened your understanding of the underlying customer need: Some epics will be altered, others reprioritized, and new ones created.
How do we know we’ve done it right
Features you add to your backlog are not just mentioned by a single customer but were a recurring theme.
Not everything that was mentioned made it into our upcoming release backlog. The nice-to-haves go into the “next release” or “wishlist” bucket. We’ll need to investigate them a bit more.
After that, we’ll be able to answer whether we are on track and what needs to be done before the release.
So, what now?
If we realized in one of the steps we correct the user journey, the focus group or the backlock grooming stage.
Otherwise we already plan the next round of customer interviews :)
Daniel Sontag connects the bots: As Industry 4.0 lead and manager for connected products, he does what he loves — tying business to tech, and theory to practice.
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