How Product Teams Can Become Customer Centric
Part One
Picture this, you’re six months into a project. The tasks keep piling up, and you’re churning out features, trying to hit your release date. There is endless debate between team members, the scope keeps expanding, and in the middle of the chaos you find yourself asking, “Why are we building this? What are we doing?” Sound familiar?
Product teams are continually under pressure to release products in less time and on tighter budgets—especially now. Whether you’re a product owner, a UX practitioner, or part of the engineering team, you’ve probably been asked to build a new product or feature, without understanding what problem you’re solving. A stakeholder (or the highest paid person) has a great idea, but you’re not so sure it’s a good idea. Maybe you feel like you have no choice—you have a release date to hit and stakeholders to please. You think to yourself, “there has to be a better way!”
A different approach
Product teams often go straight from idea to solution without testing or strategy. As the team starts solutioning, the focus is on tactical and technical details where it’s easy to lose sight of customer needs. One way to prevent this is to build empathy for customers and create a shared understanding of their goals and needs. Design thinking isn’t new, but many teams are starting to realize how design thinking can transform the way they develop products, services, and strategy for teams to become more customer centric. This approach balances what is desirable for customers with what is technologically feasible and viable for the business. These three lenses help frame the design thinking process.
Tim Brown, Executive Chair of IDEO said it best, “Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”
The power of design thinking for product teams lies in bringing together diverse perspectives and building an understanding of real customers’ needs. When your team and your work is focused around your customers and their needs, you’re able to align on what’s important. The culture shifts from being engineering led, product led, or design led, to being customer centric. This allows teams to stop debating or pushing their own agendas and align on providing value to your customers. This leads to better outcomes for your customers, team, and the business.
An iterative framework
The emphasis of design thinking is on bringing ideas to life based on how customers think, feel and behave, looping back to different places in the process as you gather new insights and learn. The framework is iterative, flexible, and focused on collaboration.
The Stages of design thinking
Empathize—Conduct research to understand your customers.
Define—Analyze your research insights and identify customer pain points and challenges.
Ideate—Turn challenges into opportunities for innovation and brainstorm solutions.
Prototype—Build a representation of your idea—anything can be prototyped!
Test—Get feedback from customers to learn—loop back to the first stage to understand customer needs and iterate as needed.
A beginner’s mindset
Adopting a beginner’s mindset allows us to be curious, ask questions, and avoid assumptions, which is what we need to truly focus on our customers’ needs.
This allows us to be:
Human-centered—beginning with empathy to understand the needs and challenges of our customers.
Collaborative—bringing together diverse perspectives helps us better solve complex challenges. We’re building products together. You might look at the problem differently as a business analyst, an engineer, a UX practitioner, a product owner, but we’re all working together in collaboration to create something on behalf of our users.
Optimistic—the belief that we all can create change by turning challenges into opportunities.
Experimental—giving us permission to fail, learn from our mistakes, and change direction as needed. It’s a continuous learning process.
How to introduce a new way to think about product development
Getting buy-in for new processes is challenging, especially in large organizations. Albert Einstein once said “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” It’s a lot harder to get buy-in if you work in a silo and try to push new ways of working on your team. You’ll have much better outcomes if you start small and involve your team. Stay tuned for part two where we’ll dig into how to find areas of opportunity on your team, and start with small wins that will eventually lead to cultural change and mindset shifts.