Knowing the right things to build is less magic and more process.
Here’s a summary of the philosophy behind Productyzer, a simple and unique approach to building the right thing:
Needs first - Customer needs and goals are the building blocks of great products.
Whole journey - Needs and goals should inform the end-to-end customer experience.
Same metrics - Companies and customers should measure whether needs and goals are met identically.
Syntax matters - Using the same language reduces “lost in translation” fallout.
Fresh data - Like fruit, customer data should be consumed fresh.
The Productyzer process is simple: Observe. Listen. Prioritize.
Observe.
Observing customers and users is absolutely essential to understanding unmet needs. After experimenting with dozens of qualitative and quantitative methods on a wide range of projects, I’ve come to recommend a combination of three approaches most often:
Day in the Life - Understanding the broader context and real lives/jobs of your users and customers provides context and builds empathy. Direct observation of human behavior by trained individuals reveals unmet needs that people may be unaware of and/or not articulate in interviews. Learning to perform and performing the tasks oneself gives an even deeper understanding.
Think Aloud - Listening carefully while watching your customers and potential customers use your product and/or competitive products highlights unmet needs, unfulfilled aspirations, and related jobs-to-be-done.
Actual Use - Measuring actual use of products, features, etc., validates whether a problem is actually important to your customers and which features are worth investing in.
Your observations should be reframed as product building blocks:
When I _______, I need to (increase/decrease) the _______ of _______.
Notice that the building block gives context (When I…), includes the word need, indicates a direction (increase/decrease), and unit of measurement. This simple, consistent syntax helps reduce confusion and increase validity and reliability in your quantitative Prioritization process.
Other sources of customer data such as NPS and feature requests from sales are valuable but should be reframed as building blocks as well.
Listen.
Listening during a needs-first interview is both pleasantly simple and deceptively difficult. The simple part is mastering only three questions and reframing into product building blocks.
Here are the three questions:
What do you want to accomplish?
Why?
How will you measure success?
The difficult part is asking these three questions over and over without adding leading questions (e.g., “But, do you like feature X?”) or annoying the interviewee. Starting the interview by describing your desire to deeply understand the most important unmet needs of your customer and maintaining an active, constructive interview style will reduce the likelihood of annoying the interviewee. An active, constructive style means authentically and obviously care about what the interview is saying and consciously building upon the responses. Also, silence is your friend as an interviewer. Allow people a few moments to resume talking before you jump back in.
The interview process should focus on the whole journey that a prospect takes starting with discovering and defining the problem or need, researching solutions, deciding how to proceed, using the solution, and measuring success.
These three questions will give you all the data you need to create product building blocks, which you should do in real time during the interview to maximize clarity and reduce translation time later. A product building block is a statement of a customer need that gives your designers and developers the best opportunity of understanding and solving customer problems.
The building block syntax is as follows:
When I _______, I need to (increase/decrease) the _______ of _______.
Notice again that the building block gives context (When I…), includes the word need, indicates a direction (increase/decrease), and unit of measurement.
Here’s an example of a reframe for a statement like, “I hate when people bother me for no reason when I’m trying to get stuff done.”
Reframe: When I am deeply involved in a task, I need to decrease the frequency of non-critical, non-urgent interruptions.
As mentioned, the goal of reframing is clarity. Ideal responses to the reframing process are “That’s right.” and “No, when I…” with a correction. For the reframe above, I would respond, “That’s right!” and hope that the promise of unified communications someday comes true.
At the end of an interview, you should have dozens of product building blocks from across the end-to-end customer experience to prioritize. When asked “how many people should I interview?”, I would say at least 5 and as many as you can afford given your budget and timeline. Also, assume that you will need to conduct interviews as often as every month or quarter for some markets to keep the data fresh.
Prioritize.
Your Observe and Listen phases should generate somewhere between 50 to 250 unique building blocks; nearly identical building blocks can be combined, especially if you have a large number . Prioritizing your building blocks requires a comparison between how critical and urgent a need is and how satisfied a customer is with the existing solutions. Addressing needs that are neither critical nor urgent is a waste of time and money.
A simple formula for prioritizing your building blocks is as follows:
Critical + Urgent - Satisfied = Priority
A survey of 30-300 customers and prospects asking the following questions for each building block, along with a few demographic questions, provides sufficient prioritization data:
How critical is this need on a scale from 0 to 10? (0 = unimportant, 10 = my job depends on it)
How urgent is this need? (0 = no plan for investment, 10 = I am looking for a solution now)
How satisfied are you with your current solution? (0 = no solution, 10 = no plan to change solutions)
For example, a building block with a 10 in Critical, an 8 in Urgent, and a 4 in Satisfied would have a Priority of 14 (10+8-4). The highest Priority score a building block can have is 20; the lowest is -10.
In addition to prioritizing the building blocks individually, relationships between building blocks and demographics should also be examined. For example, analysis may suggest that a number of unmet needs may be shared by respondents for particular industry, highlighting a possible opportunity for product, sales, marketing, etc.
Roughly sizing the opportunity and investment required for the building blocks with the highest Priority determines the roadmap. A minimum viable business case and minimum viable technical sizing triangulates the building block data to finalize the prioritization process. For example, an unmet need with a high Priority score may require a prohibitive amount of investment.
Communicate.
Importantly, the prioritization data should be shared throughout an organization to inform not only product and development, but also strategy, sales, and marketing.
Ideally, this process is iterative and participatory throughout development as well. For example, prototypes and user testing continue the customer feedback process as products and features are developed.
The next time someone at your company or one of your customers asks what your product roadmap looks like, don’t hold an idea session with a lot of sticky notes on the wall...at least not until you have prioritized unmet needs to solve against.