Rapid consumer validation for innovation pipelines
Connecting with customers throughout the creation process can foster high-speed innovation from the very start.
Katherine Li, strategy lead at propelland
Innovation is easier said than done. Having a desire to innovate doesn’t equate to a clear-cut path toward the solution with the greatest impact. But it is the first step to getting there. More often than not, customers don’t know what they want out of innovation. That’s why it’s our job as thinkers, makers, and hackers to show them what’s possible through experimentation and collaboration. When you co-create with customers, you’re able to gain a deeper understanding of where they are in their journey and what they truly need to take the next step further. To help you kick off the co-creation process with customers, we present five questions you can ask customers to uncover valuable insights and accelerate their innovation roadmap.
1. What strategic space do you want to play in?
Share your vision for where you want to be in a few years and where you can provide unique value, informed by prior research and experimentation. For example, if you’re interested in becoming a more sustainable brand, define what it means for your company and for customers, e.g. more transparency in the supply chain, adopting more circular economy principles for design, with some level of detail and differentiation from competitors. Also, clearly define the desired impact and how you will measure success so that you can provide proof points along the way to key stakeholders and executive sponsors.
2. What’s your current go-to-market approach?
Start with your current state to understand what steps and stakeholder support are required to launch a new product, service, or business. If there isn’t a clear process for evaluating and managing tradeoffs, experiment and put some practices in place so that consumer ideas and feedback can be considered and implemented. Closing the loop is especially important to make a credible claim of co-creation. In addition, you’ll need to invest in managing a customer community aligned to your vision and ready to engage with the internal team.
3. What role can consumers play?
Consider how consumers can be involved in the development process from end-to-end to provide valuable insights and de-risk future propositions, instead of just leveraging them at the end. Many organizations may not be set up to assess and implement consumer feedback in their usual development flow or an iterative manner for products, services, and experiences. To enable rapid, consumer-driven prototyping and validation, team members need to be exposed to consumer behaviors and work together from the beginning.
Evaluate how your current innovation roadmap considers the need of current and aspirational audiences, rather than retrofitting the outputs of that roadmap to consumer market trends. Whether you conduct competitive research, talk to a few KOLs, or carry out a quantitative survey, you will co-develop a better understanding of the opportunity space and a compelling narrative before diving into the roadmap and prototyping. You might find it effective to facilitate a joint brainstorming session with some guardrails or key criteria before sketching out initial solutions. Subsequently, institute rapid test and learn cycles to ensure iterative progress, capture consumer behaviors in action, and continue to feed the pipeline in the form of MVPs and limited market launches. As the development process can often be long and expensive, considering consumer validation and feedback at several stages of the journey rather than just at the end, mitigates risk and can strengthen ties with the brand.
4. Can you frontload feedback and collaborate in a much more agile way?
Ensure that feedback is delivered in a digestible way and can be acted upon in the short and long-term. While many companies ask for customer feedback, they often don’t have a system or intended outcome, which results in inefficient usage or frustrated customers. Many people fill out customer satisfaction surveys, but don’t experience any follow up, even when the feedback is overwhelmingly positive or negative. Instead of asking for feedback on vanity metrics that don’t have a significant impact on the roadmap of future products, services, and experiences, invest in creating strong, engaged user communities that regularly provide meaningful feedback for future offerings. It’s about creating more touchpoints and opportunities to work together.
5. What user community do you want to build, and what value will it create for the business and the user?
Often, user communities for products or particular interests can be relatively dispersed across Reddit, forums, Discord, Instagram, and other sites. Building a brand platform can create a space for users to provide feedback in one place, but the value to each individual that uses it needs to be clear to ensure tech adoption. Before going too far down the path, define the level of co-creation you’re looking for and the purpose that it serves. How much control do you want to retain over the development process? What areas of the innovation pipeline or roadmap do you want to expose? Being honest regarding what level of participation you expect (or level of control you wish to maintain), and how this may impact your new products, services, and experiences can help you create realistic rules of engagement.
You might want to start with smaller groups or one-on-one discussions to learn what works before leveraging an off-the-shelf solution or a custom digital platform. Jumping to the latter too quickly might omit smaller, lower-stakes experiments to refine the experience before making larger resource commitments. Have a clear, documented list of questions to validate as well as initial hypotheses to guide insights sessions, and determine which platforms make the most sense to capture that feedback.
