From Five Whys to Five Whats: Unlocking Exceptional Value in Software Products

Five Whys is great way to diagnose root causes. Five Whats will help you maximise the value from your software, delight your customers and grow your company.

The Five Whys of the Toyota Production System has applications far beyond its original application in manufacturing. Eric Ries gives it a good airing in the context of software engineering in his book and blogs for The Lean Startup and my children became experts at an early age on very wide range of topics!

For me, the attraction lies in the simplicity of the method: repeatedly (and blamelessly) asking “why” to peel away the layers of a problem until the underlying issue, often a failure of preparation or education, is revealed. My Five Whats of software value operates in a similarly straightforward fashion: repeatedly (and enthusiastically) asking “what” the software enables for the people who use it or experience its application. Let’s start with an example. Actually, let’s start with the example that planted this idea in my head, my experience at SpeechStorm.

Learning on the job

SpeechStorm was born very sophisticated speech self-service or so-called Interactive Voice Response (IVR) projects — what most of us know as the annoying voice menus that greet every call to your bank, phone or utility provider. Seeing how complex these projects were to develop, but noting that they had common, repeatable elements, we built a platform to make it easier by replacing development with an easy-to-use configuration interface.

SpeechStorm delivered exceptional value to the businesses that adopted it, though not in the way that was immediately obvious to them or us.

When we first went to market, we pitched the ease of configuration and the savings made compared to traditional IVR development. We got some traction, but it was a hard sell, especially to in-house development teams who preferred hand-coding and felt threatened. Most IVRs didn’t change often and so the savings were seen as modest or one-off. We needed to demonstrate more value to the business.

I decided to spend more time with the teams who adopted our product, unknowingly following another Toyota wisdom which I have since learnt is genchi gembutsu — “go and see for yourself”. I saw that teams using our product behaved differently to traditional IVR development teams. They made more frequent changes and experimented more, measuring the impact of changes over time. This was interesting. If more changes were being made, then the savings weren’t just one-off, they accumulated over time.

But more was to come. The ease of making changes to the IVR also made personalisation possible, that is, presenting options to callers based on information about those callers or the context of the call. Now we weren’t just delivering savings in development, our software was being used to improve customer experience.

The impact was stunning. Callers presented with personalised menus more than doubled their use of self-service options. This meant huge savings for the business and, because those callers found it easier to get the answers they needed, there were knock-on improvements in Customer Satisfaction and Net Promoter Score.

Method from madness

I see now that what we went through follows a logical progression that can be replicated elsewhere. By repeatedly questioning what our product did and what impact that had on those who came into contact with it, we had unlocked a source of significant and sustainable value in terms of both savings to our business customers and in the customer experience they in turn were able to deliver. In question and answer form, it went like this:

1. What does the software do?
Answer: Provides pre-built modules, drag & drop design and one-click deployment for Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems.

2. What does the software do for the development teams who use it?
Answer: Reduces the time effort to design, build and deploy IVR by 70% compared to traditional development.

3. What happens when you reduce the time and effort to deliver changes?
Answer: Teams automate more functions, make more frequent changes and can personalise the menus.

4. What is the impact of personalisation on the customer?
Answer: With personalised menus, twice as many customers choose self-service and they complain less about the IVR.

5. What is the impact on the business of higher self-service rates and fewer complaints?
Answer: Massive cost savings from automation and improved Net Promoter Score.

Proceeding in this way had profound impact on how we described and developed SpeechStorm from that point onwards. Personalisation became our focus, driving sales, product marketing, product roadmap and our approach to implementation. Focusing on this help us find better prospects, win more business and deliver a more valuable, differentiated product.

When to Five Whats

I recommend the Five Whats especially for companies experiencing any of the following:

• struggling to get traction at senior levels in the businesses they are selling to;
• getting pushback with questions of return on investment;
• seeing enthused-about projects to implement suddenly falling down the priority list.

Business leaders are constantly presented with proposals promising increments in top line revenue and reductions in cost. Most of these proposals, even if sensible, will deliver only modest returns and businesses simply don’t have the capacity to do them all. In this environment, it is the product professional’s job to find and articulate a higher order of value that will set his or her solution apart and make it worthy of being prioritised.

The Five Whats pushes you towards finding a higher order of value, either in absolute quantitative terms — increased revenue, cost saving — or in terms of strategic impact.

The linkage is clear:

• By articulating a higher order of value, you make your proposal more compelling and/or capture more value for what you deliver;
• By aligning your offer more closely with the concerns of executive and senior management, you make it easier to get their attention, support and approval;
• Your marketing team can develop better content, potentially appealing to a wider business audience, but certainly on a topic that is more important to that audience;
• Your sales team will find it easier to qualify opportunities and support project sponsors in developing a business case for investment, improving win rates and deal velocity;
• You will have a better platform to engage audiences in conference or round table events, focused on business impact and outcomes rather than features;
• You will have a clearer focus for your product roadmap to deliver still further value and a broader vantage point from which to identify adjacent opportunities.

How to Five Whats

You may need more or less than five iterations to get to your goal. The first step is to state clearly and succinctly what your software does. Next, identify the various individuals and groups who come directly contact with it, those who implement or maintain it and follow their experience. If you are struggling, consider at least these five dimensions of value: the software itself, impact on users, changes to their behaviour or management, effects on customers and any use of the data the system produces.

Involve others in the exercise — colleagues from your product and development teams, sales and marketing, senior management, business partners, customers and their customers. What they tell you, what you see and the reactions you get will tell you if you are on the right track or point you in new directions.

The Five Whats does not guarantee a “right” answer. You are not narrowing in on a root cause, but rather looking to expand your appeal, so there may be many possible answers and a number of alternative value paths to explore.

Some advice:

1. Be patient. You are looking for value beyond what is obvious, so it may take time to find. Your users and customers will need time to adapt to your software, and you will need time to observe the impact it has.

2. Listen. It can be tough to hear find out that your product doesn’t deliver value in the way you hoped or that customers don’t use it as you intended, but that’s exactly what you need to know.

3. Measure. The value you uncover must be real and verifiable — you can’t just make it up! SpeechStorm’s success owed much to the customers who shared their results with us or with new prospects, provided testimonials and supported case studies. Get to this and you will have found pure gold.

And finally …
4. Genchi gembutsu — “go and see for yourself”. I promise you won’t regret it.

Author’s note: SpeechStorm was acquired by Genesys in December 2015.

Originally published at https://www.511north.com on November 13, 2019.