Customer Focus Won’t Save You
Focusing on your users / customers is certainly one of the most important aspects of product development but lately it gets hyped as the silver bullet to your problems — it’s not that easy. Depending on your product and its users too much focus on your customer instead of the product itself can lead to short sighted decision making.
The first thing that changes the value of customer focus is the number and diversity of your stakeholders. If your product has small number of different stakeholders you can very effectively focus on their behalfs. That makes customer focus in the world of B2C-Software mostly more usefull than in B2B. If you have to handle a lot of different groups of interest you have to be much more cautious on who you focus how much.
The kind of customer is also an important factor for how much value you create by focusing on him. You will have very different users of your product with their own goals and ideas. A good example are products in the gaming industry which have to handle hardcore and casual gamers (and everything in between) at the same time. The value you can create by focusing on each type off user can be vastly different.
The level of personal investment of your users into your product should also alter your approach. If you are not that important for your users (which is not automatically bad or needs to be changed) maybe they can’t really add that much innovation to your product. On the other hand your software can be kind of scary important to some of your users which can also cloud their judgement of what should be changed or improved.
Also you / your company could have a vision for the product that your users don’t understand or can’t be communicated yet. This could be long term goals which require a temporary different focus than your customer to reach new level.
User experience is extremely important in the long run but maybe you need to take a step back and question if it’s really that important now.
My name is Adrian Weigel and I am part of the product development team at Reservix. English isn’t my native language so please bear with me …
