In business, there are several realities one must confront. For one, business changes, that’s really a constant. In another frame, it changes in ways we don’t fully understand without hearing the voice of the customer. That’s the brilliant part, if obvious: If you want to know what to focus on in business, ask the market, it will tell you. Shockingly, not all businesses – in particular, technology ones – focus on customer feedback as a directive.
Weird.
We hear all kinds of interesting opportunistic stories about problems that were solved in ways that weren’t born in research, feedback, and response, but rather by pure dumb luck.
Who has time for those kinds of gambles?
How do you build on that?
What’s the strategy lesson there?
We prefer to take the informed approach: listening to our customers. The voice of the customer lays out where we should focus our strategy to address the changes in business. Within the conversations we have are the very clues we need to shape the outcome we’re looking for – and our customers want, by the way. That said, how you ask your customer what they really want, what is their ‘Why’, is as important as simply knowing to ask them in the first place.
Over the course of the last year or so, we’ve been crafting innovative ideas based on research. These ideas are intended to grow and become “productized” market offerings. We’ve been successful in synthesizing customer feedback into real, marketable products that sell. The problem is, even with customer feedback, not all product ideas should ever see the light of day.
How does one deal with crafting what is likely a bad idea, bringing it to life and learning quickly of its imminent failure without wasting time and money?
That’s where a fail-fast method comes into play – the so-called Minimum Viable Product (MVP). In this blog series, we’re going to explore the ways to develop new product offerings, bring them to market, kill them quick or drive them to successful go-to-market at scale – all guided by the voice of the ‘buying’ customer. Here’s a quick fly-by on our next blog(s) in this series:
The MVP Method (aka, SyncDev)
Make Sur You Meet Sell-Design-Build Prerequisites
Day One: The 3Ps -- Prospects, Pitch, Product
Day Two: Set Two Customer Meetings
Meet with your customers, but not only those you know well
Conduct Waves of Reviews
Drive to Success (or failure, quickly, so you can begin anew)