Why teams build things customers don’t care about
Most ideas are great on paper, and suck in real life.
Let’s say you have an idea for how to improve a service your company delivers. Or maybe an idea for a new app, sales process, CRM programme or an upgrade to your website. Your ideas could be amazing. But there’s a problem. They probably won’t work in the way you think they will.
You see, we are all pretty fond of our ideas, even if they’re doomed to fail. For various reasons, when we originate a solution ourselves, we tend to imbue it with magic powers. This typically leads to us set fire to 80% of our development budget because we end up building things we love, but customers don’t care about. Here’s how.
- We overestimate how easy an idea will be to deliver, how well it will perform and how simple it will be to implement
- The longer we work on a solution, the better we think it is (see point 1)
- We tend to search for data that confirms that our idea is incredible and ignore data that suggests otherwise
“This trifecta of misjudgement is why 90% of apps get deleted after one use; why 90% of startups fail and why 80% of your customers are excited about just 20% of the features you build for them”
In short, it’s really really easy to build things you think customers will love, but actually they don’t care about. Ouch!
Don’t worry, there’s a way to find the ideas that work.
There are two ways to out if an idea for a product or service will work. The first is to build it. This has the nasty side effect of being quite slow and quite expensive. The second is to build a prototype of the solution and show it to customers, this teaches us the same thing but costs less and can be done really quickly (5 days). We help clients save lots of time and money by doing this.
Google Ventures developed an accelerated product development process called a Design Sprint. This sees a team take a problem (e.g. which features should our app have?), unpack it, develop solutions, prototype the best ones and then interview real customers to find out what they like, what they don’t and what needs to change for them to love it. It’s a career-changing experience and one we’ve based our business on.
How does it work?
The process takes 5 days, Monday to Friday, 10am to 5pm. By day five you will have working prototypes of your product / service that have been battle-tested with real customers. You’ll know where to go next, which solutions you can invest in with confidence, and what changes you need to make to create a real point of difference in the market.
