How to build a successful digital product development process?
Building the right product for the right customers : that’s the key to success for every startup.
But putting the customer at the heart of a company’s product development process is a complex and long lasting challenge that requires hard work on three main areas: culture, organization and methodology.
Being customer-centric is first and foremost a matter of culture
For a company, being customer-centric means putting the customer at the core of its preoccupations. Everyone in the company has to be concerned, from the customer support team to the top management.
In a constantly changing environment, being customer-centric also means being able to react to evolving customer expectations in an agile manner. If the now famous GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) grew so fast and were so successful, it is precisely because they managed to keep the agility they had in the beginning while they were still small startups.
In his 2016 letter to shareholders, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos insisted on the fact that to survive, his company had to “keep the vitality of day 1”. Among 4 factors that explain Amazon’s day 1 success, Jeff Bezos puts forward their “True customer obsession” and “High velocity decision-making”.
This culture of putting the customer first is inspired by Design Thinking methodologies that have been gaining audience in startup ecosystems all around the world for the past 20 years. Today’s most successful companies (Airbnb, Slack, Uber…) all embrace these methods in their product development processes.
Product Managers are responsible for creating and maintaining “customer-centricity” within the company
Big principles are never enough to build something truly stable and that’s why companies also need people and processes to anchor a long lasting customer-centric culture.
In modern digital companies, the people who are responsible for putting the customer at the heart of a company’s innovation are called Product Managers. Over the past 10 years, Product Managers have been growing in importance within the company and they now occupy c-level functions with usually a big decision power.
Product Managers take care of building a successful product while aligning the rest of the company on a common strategic vision and a clear product roadmap. He works on a daily basis with other departments that rely on the product and he has to make sure that they always have the customer in mind.
Product Managers actually incarnate the customer within the company. Josh Elman from Greylock Partners explains the role of product management and its importance within the company with very well.
Best practices
Once a company has a customer-centric culture and a Product Manager to keep it alive, it’s time to tackle all the difficulties that can arise in product developement:
- bad understanding of customer needs
- customer data overload
- poor product communication towards teammates and customers
- difficulties to prioritize what needs to be built next
- etc.
In order to overcome these difficulties and uncertainties, successful processes have emerged within technology companies, which rely mainly on agile methodologies and can be resumed in what is called the “feedback loop”.
Indeed, a successful product developement usually relies with constantly collecting and analyzing customer feedback in order to understand the market needs and iterate as fast as possible. Customer feedback can teach companies market insights and help them prioritize correctly.
Once feedback has been gathered, analyzed and prioritized, a new feature is ultimately built. After the feature release, product teams start gathering feedback again to evaluate what went wrong and how the feature can be improved. This process starts again and again, hence the feedback “loop”.
Product development is always under… development
I think Product development is bound to evolve rapidly in the following years due to technological breakthroughs (machine learning, blockchain and collaborative product development platforms…) and startups will have to adapt in order to succeed.
However, the foundations of Design Thinking and Agile methodologies will remain and still be the key pillars of successful product development. These pillars will keep companies focused on what really matters: delivering value to their customers.
