{"id":1039,"date":"2020-02-26T08:16:11","date_gmt":"2020-02-26T08:16:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/?p=1039"},"modified":"2020-02-26T08:16:21","modified_gmt":"2020-02-26T08:16:21","slug":"so-youre-customer-centric","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/2020\/02\/26\/so-youre-customer-centric\/","title":{"rendered":"So, you\u2019re customer centric?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This week, for the umpteenth time, I met a team in the process of putting a new product in the market, telling me that they were so customer centric. What they meant was that during development, they\u2019d talked to a number of potential customers and some of the employees had used prototypes. For those that read my articles on a regular basis, it will come as no surprise that I disagree with this view. There are at least three aspects that I think are critical to be truly customer centric: choose your customer, measure before you build and focus on behavior, not words.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, there\u2019s a fundamental difference between making customers \nhappy and making happy customers. Many product teams with which I\u2019ve \ninteracted have vague and conflicting notions of who their target \ncustomer is. That makes it very likely that within the team, efforts are\n focused on different aspects of the product and that feedback from any \nindividual viewed as a potential customer is immediately incorporated as\n the absolute truth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be customer centric, the first step has to be to define who you \nwant your customer to be. Products that try to be everything to everyone\n will fail. The challenge of defining the customer is that you need to \nsay no to categories of customers and it feels like you\u2019re limiting the \nmarket of your product. In addition, team members often have different \nopinions and engaging in constructive conflict is extremely difficult in\n many corporate cultures. However, if you don\u2019t know for whom you\u2019re \nbuilding the product, you can\u2019t be successful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Second, investment decisions in R&D are almost always based on \nopinions and qualitative feedback from a very small customer sample that\n almost certainly isn\u2019t representative of the actual customer base. The \nmechanism to avoid this is to measure customer response \u2013 \u201csignal\u201d \u2013 \nbefore you even invest a single dime into building anything. Of course, \nthe lean startup movement and Steve Blank\u2019s books have been advocating \nthis for decades, but in industry, this is still far from adopted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The general feedback that I receive in response to the suggestion to \ntest product concepts and potential features with customers is \nthreefold. First, we don\u2019t want to expose our customers to bad, \nimmature, unfinished products as it will hurt our brand and our \ncustomers\u2019 perception of us as a company. Second, what we\u2019re doing is \nunique and we need to keep it a secret as long as possible so that our \ncompetitors don\u2019t get wind of our plans. Third, marketing likes to \nsurprise the market with a bombarding of messaging and if we go out \nearly for testing purposes, everyone knows what\u2019s coming and marketing \ncan\u2019t do its job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All of these reasons are orders of magnitude less relevant than \nputting a product in the market that nobody wants and, with that, \nwasting all your R&D resources. Every investment in R&D, whether\n it\u2019s new features in existing products or entirely new products, needs \nto be driven by a clear signal from the market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Third, product teams put way too much stock into what customers say. \nBoth in B2C and B2B contexts, most new products introduced to the market\n fail. In the fast-moving customer goods (FMCG) space, the failure rate \nis, according to some studies, above 85 percent. This is despite the \nfact that every one of these products had extremely positive feedback \nfrom potential customers. Decisions in product teams should, to the \nlargest extent possible, be based on measuring what customers do, rather\n than on what they say. For all kinds of reasons, customers will be much\n more positive in their verbal responses than in their actual behavior.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Developing new products is hard as you\u2019re dealing with lots of uncertainty, internal stress and negative feedback from the rest of the organization. This can easily lead to the product team ending up in an X-Files style \u201cI want to believe\u201d situation where any feedback not supporting the current direction is filtered out. To be successful, however, you need to maintain the positive drive in the team while being crystal clear on who your customer is, be data driven in your decision-making and focus on customer behavior. Be customer centric, but do it for real!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To get more insights earlier, sign up for my newsletter at <\/em>jan@janbosch.com<\/em><\/a> or follow me on<\/em> janbosch.com\/blog<\/em><\/a>, LinkedIn (<\/em>linkedin.com\/in\/janbosch<\/em><\/a>) or Twitter (<\/em>@JanBosch<\/em><\/a>).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week, for the umpteenth time, I met a team in the process of putting a new product in the market, telling me that they were so customer centric. What they meant was that during development, they\u2019d talked to a number of potential customers and some of the employees had used prototypes. For those that … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,9,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1039"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1039"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1039\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1042,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1039\/revisions\/1042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/janbosch.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}