Real, practical ways to identify customer and user needs (Part 1)

Do you know the cartoon often used for agile product development where the intended design of the swing gets misconstrued into malformed shapes? Ok, this is not yet another article about agile or waterfall, etc. I want to focus on a broader and yet more practical topic. That is, how does a product management professional identify customer and user needs practically and sustainably? Perhaps your organization or team is new to this. I want to say a few words that could help you get started. If you don’t have a PM in your team because you’re a startup or your org hasn’t been built with a product function, I want to guide you with a few thoughts on implementing a few practices so you can wear that hat to better identify needs. Finally, perhaps your organization has this — box checked, you say. Instead, I want to start a conversation to peel back the layers to understand where the gaps are.

Why is it important to dive deeper into this topic of ways to identifying and understanding customer/user needs? According to a paper by NASA’s Johnson Space Center, the cost of errors escalate as it moves from needs and requirements to development and operations. In fact, when errors make it to the operational stage, the unit of cost to fix the error exponentially grows to 29 -500 units. The financial costs, time cost, and resources wasted are…