Stop fooling yourself

If the customer is not using the features you’re developing it doesn’t matter how good they are, it doesn’t matter that you’re superfast, it’s still waste!

With digitalization the world is becoming more uncertain which requires that we change our mindset. We need to see ourselves as a learning organization. We don’t really know what will delight the customer tomorrow. We need to continuously learn and adapt our offer, structure and organization to meet our customers’ expectations. We even need to exceed those!

We should all ask ourselves if we’re fooling ourselves or not. Are our customers and consumers using our services as we intended? Are our services creating true value? Or have we developed them in vain? We need to measure in order to understand our situation and to give guidance what steps to take going forward.

Traditional KPIs as number of features or number of fixed defects is not providing any value in such context because it doesn’t tell us if we have provided customer value or not. It is simply vanity metrics and by focusing on the number of features developed and compare that to other teams or even other companies we’re just fooling ourselves.

Let’s use sports as an example in general and soccer in particular. They have found an easily understandable way to measure that tells them quite a lot. The ones that wins is the ones that scores most goals, easy to measure, easy to understand and change behavior. They calculate the number of wins and losses which will change their tactics etc.

But most importantly it’s not biased with opinions. Of course, it is good to ask customers if they like your idea and feature but people tend to be nice and the metric ends up to be a false metric. Measure their behavior instead, are they paying for the feature as they said they would, are they using our service as they said they would etc.

How DO YOU know that you’re not fooling yourselves?

_____________

Two reading recommendations

Lean Anatlytics: https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Analytics-Better-Startup-Faster-ebook/dp/B00AG66LTM/

The Mom Test — How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you: https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone-ebook/dp/B01H4G2J1U/