Why Your Product Teams Should Be Doing Customer Discovery
Product managers know how important it is to align their products with their customers. The best possible way to run a modern business that sells products is to utilize modern tools to help you undergo detailed user research. If your business isn’t doing customer discovery, then it’s going to fall behind businesses that do.
Doing Customer Discovery
Customer discovery is the ideal way to minimize risk by creating products that actively appeal to your customer base. It’s is all about testing and checking all of your assumptions about your customers (What is Customer Discovery, Future Founders). It’s about interviewing them and figuring out their current problems, how they solve them, and what they are trying to accomplish. The goal is to understand your customers and what they want.
There are various challenges to building a modern business, and customer discovery helps to remove much of the challenge in finding products that you know will sell. Creating a product is a big investment for any business – whether it’s a physical product or a software product. Many businesses waste resources simply by failing to conduct proper user research to understand who they are selling to, and why.
With the help of using customer discovery, though, you can soon overcome these challenges and better understand your customers and your clients. Why, though, is this such a powerful and effective tool for the modern business to use?
Identifying Risks
There are some major risks that product organizations need to constantly tackle as they develop new product lines, features, and improvements to their products: value risk, viability risk, usability risk, and feasibility risk (The Four Big Risks, SVPG) .
- Value Risk. How valuable is your product? Are you creating something that, actually, people might have little to no use for? If so, why are you creating it? What does it offer that will make users choose to buy — especially ahead of your competition?
- Viability Risk. Another point to consider is how viable this product is — does it work as part of your larger business ideology? A new product/service might seem like a good idea, but does it really work as a viable part of everything else you sell? Does it naturally link?
- Usability Risk. Of course, what good is a product if nobody can work out how to use it? This is the most commonly seen risk that comes true. If you create a product that people simply cannot understand or use without extensive learning, then they will look elsewhere.
- Feasibility Risk. This ties well into the above — how feasible is it to have said product created? Do you have the time, the tools, and the technicians on board to actually make said product come to life? This is often a risk considered last, despite being so important.
When you are building your product team, one of the most important discoveries that you are likely to make is how good they are at understanding risk. Poor product teams will not take into account the likelihood of risk; quality product teams fully understand that risks are commonplace in any industry. That’s why we recommend that you start doing research; it will really open the eyes of your product team to some of the major risks that exist out there.
Tackling Risks with Customer Discovery
Customer discovery helps cover the risks that businesses take on when building products.
Quality product teams understand that major risks are likely to appear. Customer discovery helps cover the risks that businesses take on when building products.
Creating new products is risky, but by carrying out customer discovery, it can be a less challenging, fraught experience. The main reason is that it helps you work out the two most important risks above: Value Risk and Usability Risk.
With a bit of research, your team will know if the product is valuable to your audience, and how easy it would be for them to use. This happens before you’ve committed time, money, and people to the product.
Go Forth and Understand Your Customers
Keep these factors in mind, and the normally arduous process of creating products customers love can become so much simpler moving forward. By doing customer discovery, your business can create products and continue to deliver features that you know are valuable.
At Clarity Hub, we are creating a platform for product teams to conduct user interviews, organize all their data and insights, and work as a team to collaborate on identifying problems and solutions.
Request early access to start doing customer discovery.
