The lazy PM’s way to keep hitting all the moving Customer Needs!
Use what you know to find out what you don’t
It is common practice to develop while you leave room for changing requirements: agile methodology.
But as a Product Manager, how do you keep track of customer needs? Especially when they seem to be moving targets?
When your release cycles are long or you have dynamic customers you need a way to stay at the pulse of your market. And you’ll want to use your time and energy in the most impactful way.
I use a small framework I call “standoffs”. This gives structure how to handle day-to-day feedback as well as input from interviews. And it leaves room for you to also do all the other stuff you need to do as a kick-ass PM.
First: Your “Wall of Assumptions”
First, you structure the information you (assume to) know about your customers. That can be a living document of any format, whichever works for you. (Value Canvas, slides, written document, sticky notes,…)
Just make sure you include the key info about your target customers’ profiles. You collect assumptions about their jobs-to-be-done, pain points and real needs.
Second: Scan for Feedback
As PM it is easy to swing to either extreme — too busy to collect and handle all the feedback and input and spending too much time and being too influenced by customer requests.
For me, there are two sources of direct* customer feedback:
- Reactive: That’s when a customer comes to you with a request.
Be sure to ask many questions about the underlying problem. Because often the request is a solution in disguise — maybe one to a customer need you already address. - Proactive: That’s when you ask a customer for input in an interview.
So you are in the habit of seeking regular customer contact. In your interviews, you’ll need two types of questions:
- Discovery questions to find new needs in the day-to-day challenges of your customer in using your newest product or one of the competitor.
- Cross-checking questions to challenge your assumptions — does the customer give you the answer you would expect based on your “wall of assumptions”?
*indirect customer feedback, i.e. via Sales can be a good source as well. However, avoid taking part in a game of “telephone” and try to get in touch with the source to validate what you understood.
Third: See what “sticks”
Get into the habit to write your assumptions down and to challenge them on a regular basis. If needed and justified also correct them.
When you discover new needs or customer jobs to be done, you can go into the “standoff”. That is, throwing new information at your “wall of assumptions” and see what sticks ;)
- Be sure you got to the need behind the wish.
- Be sure you asked someone that fits into your customer profile — maybe you went over to another (potential) customer group without realizing it.
- Make sure the importance of the issue is not based on anecdotes. It could be an issue the customer got angry about just before contacting you (his “pain of the day”).
Hint: with a set target group and requirements you’re unlikely to find many new “true” customer needs. Typical requests are camouflaged solutions. Often they aim to satisfy known needs in a new or different (and not necessarily better) way.
If you truly arrive at a new insight go ahead and add that to your “wall of assumptions”, marked with the source and date. Next time you go into customer interaction take some questions with you to verify the new information.
How that makes you a better product person
Either way, you maximize your learning:
- Maybe you found out that the need wasn’t representative of your focus group. This way you can mark it as such and still keep in on the radar. Maybe there’s a new customer group that’s worth pursuing in future.
- Maybe you find a new need that is worth pursuing. It might be a need that came up across your target group through changing industry factors (regulations, competitor products, budget cuts).
- The rarest of gold nuggets is the discovery of an “exciting factor” (KANO model). It is a need none of your customers knows about but would be extremely valuable if solved. This can give you a real head start from your competition
Daniel Sontag connects the bots: As Industry 4 lead and manager for connected products, he does what he loves — tying business to tech, and theory to practice.
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