001: Customer Focus
I am focused on solving customer’s needs and problems by way of new product offerings or new features.
New Product Offering
When I am thinking about bringing an entirely new product to market, I first want to define who my customers are in the context of the organization through a series of questions.
Are my customers internal employees at the organization? If so, which business units do they represent? How often are they using the product? Are my customers external users who pay for the product? Are my customers external users who are using the product for free? How do our paying and non-paying customers use the product? What are the expectations of these groups when using this product? What problem or need have we solved for them? What problem or additional need has surfaced that was previously unknown?
Once I have a broad understanding of who my customers are, I want to dig into the problems they are experiencing, their job-to-be-done and alternatives they have considered. This is best performed when I have established the opportunity to engage in a user interview.
What are your big goals and areas of focus right now? What are your big problems right now? What are the implications of that problem? Can you walk me through the last time this problem happened? What makes it so awful? How are you currently dealing with this problem? How are you currently coping without a solution? Why haven’t you been able to find a solution to this already? What alternatives have you tried? How might you fit a solution into your workflow? Is there anyone else you would recommend I speak to about this problem?
This approach was the first in a series of steps I took to bring a new product offering to market during my time at Andela. It became clear that our partners were seeking talented Test Engineers in order to be proactive when it came to addressing quality assurance concerns with their products. By leveraging my expertise in Test Engineering, this new product offering was proven to be a success.
New Features
How about bringing new features online?
Before arriving to a proposed solution, I like to have an understanding of the product’s current feature set and how it currently behaves in a live environment. Whether this product is a web app or mobile application, I will begin by using the product as if I was a customer and record/categorize the current feature set.
Once I have an understanding of the outcome-oriented journeys across different user types (logged in, guest, paid, plan type, etc), I would then want to run this same exercise with this competitors in the same industry vertical in addition to customers outside of this vertical. By performing an analysis of competitors within the same vertical we can begin to reveal feature gaps and overlaps. As far as products outside of the original vertical, this analysis can be used as a source of inspiration for an out-of-the-box feature idea.
Learning what customers are saying in public domains (mobile app stores, Product Hunt, etc) as well as the data being collected in Typeform surveys or Salesforce by your customer-facing colleagues is critical in developing a comprehensive view of needs or pain points that can be translated into new features.
Having leveraged the above approach for an internal-facing web application at Andela, I began to ideate, sketch wireframes and draft a product specification for an import data feature. This feature would scan existing records that were pulled into the web app from Salesforce and copy data on a per field basis for long-form and short-form content. We were able to reduce the time it takes to create new entries from 30 minutes to 15 minutes; a clear win for our internal users that rely on this internal product for their work each day.
