Thinking about the Customer & Product

Often a startup company bases its enterprise around a product, or set of products.

To begin, when defining and building a product for you company you need to understand your users and analyze the market to build a product that is both desirable and viable. A successful product will either satisfy a need that has not yet been fulfilled in the market, or do something that has already been done before but better or cheaper than the competition.
Part of the research into the market involves researching your customer, your target audience. Customer research involves identifying your customer demographic, who they are and what they would like to be able to do (their needs), and what they are currently able to do given the products available to them.

From researching the customer’s needs you can start to think about features for a product or specific function that allows a user to accomplish a task they want to achieve. For example the need might be “to be able to share photos with family and friends”, a feature for that need could be integrating with social networking sites so customers can share their photos, or alternatively build a social network for the users of your product so they can share photos in your product’s network.

Once you have thought of a range of features and specifications to satisfy the needs of your customers, you need to consider the benefits these features will bring. Clearly the most obvious benefit for a feature is that a solution for the customer’s needs has been created. However, using the example above, one need can be solved with a number of different features, how will you choose the right one?

Going back to the example.The benefits of integrating with existing social networks are:

• Sharing is easy if your customers have already signed up to the networks
• Developing the feature is relatively quick
• Customers have already built the network of people they would like to share photo’s with on existing social network sites

The benefits of building your own social networks, around your product are:

• Customers do not need to signup to a social network they may not want to be part of
• You can control the customer experience of sharing photos in your application
• Customers do not need to leave your product to share photos
• You can build privacy controls that have been specified by your customers needs

Comparing the benefits and risks of each feature should help you decide on which features to keep, and which to throw away for your product specification.

As you work on the product specification, you also need to think about creating a product roadmap and effectively manage communication with all stakeholders. At every stage of the roadmap you need to develop metrics to measure your success and make tough decisions.

Definitions:

Product Specification: Documentation of the features required to create the product, and detail of how all features fit together in the product.

Product Roadmap: A product roadmap is a high-level plan that describes how the product is likely to grow. It allows you to express where you want to take your product.

When starting to consider the specification of your product, you need to keep the following things in mind:

• Remember the customer’s needs, make sure the product still adheres to solving their needs
• Understand the tension between benefits and risks for each product feature
• You want to keep being inquisitive and find out as much as you can from your market and customers, always be asking “WHY”

Originally published at defineproducts.com on April 20, 2016.