NETTING IT OUT

Customer experience initiatives abound. Yet few actually address a core customer-dissatisfier: the usability (and usefulness) of the core products and services your company offers. One solution: empower user experience professionals and embed them within each of your business units to help product managers and developers identify customer needs and develop products that are easy to use and to adopt, easy to support, and on target to meet a critical end-user need.

As businesses mature, many seem to lose their focus on the customer when developing products and services. Whether your organization sells airplane tickets, retirement investments, locomotives, or corn chips, you have end-users who are your primary customers: the ones for whom you should be designing your products. Unfortunately, even in an evolved “customers first” business climate, within the product line P&Ls, executives are still measured more on revenue growth and profitability than on designing products and services that are easy and useful for end-users. And therein lies a challenge and an opportunity.

The challenge is to gain high-level commitment and support for ensuring that user experience practitioners are empowered as members of your product marketing and design teams from product conception throughout the customer lifecycle.

The opportunity is to reap significant benefits from offerings that are conceived and designed in a user-centric manner, including:

• Better Products
• Faster Time to Revenue--and, Eventually, Time to Market
• Better and Faster Adoption
• Lower Support Costs
• Fanatically Happy Customers

HOW DO COMPANIES LOSE THEIR FOCUS ON MAKING IT EASY FOR THEIR CUSTOMERS TO GET THINGS DONE?

Successful Start-Ups Are Focused on Customer Context and Needs

Start-ups start out as customer-focused. Innovators and entrepreneurs discover a market need through deep observation and analysis. They study the target audience for their innovation. They understand the problems that people in their target audience are trying to solve, or the jobs/activities they need to get done, and the results they really want to achieve—both qualitatively and quantitatively. They observe the contexts in which these target customers typically find themselves. They tailor their innovations to fit into users’ lives and habits, or they discover how to help users create new habits around their offerings. They continuously test their hypotheses about solutions and value propositions with target end-users. They recruit lead users and other end-users and engage with them in iterative design. They do usability testing of their solutions before they launch them. They rapidly refine their offerings by observing how end-users actually use them. They design and wrap total solutions around their innovative products and services so that the total experience of learning about, selecting, preparing/adopting, consuming/using, refining, replenishing, upgrading, or retiring the product or service is consistent, enjoyable, and brand-appropriate. The total customer experience that surrounds their initial offering is a coherent reflection of their unique brand promise.

The start-up process that we’ve just described is well documented in Steven Blank’s seminal book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win . Steve refers to this process as the “Customer Development Model,” to contrast it with the typical “Product Development Model” that’s taught in most business schools, promulgated by many Venture Capitalists, and still adopted by most businesses today:

“All startups (whether a new division inside a larger corporation or in the canonical garage) follow similar patterns…Startups that survive the first few tough years do not follow the traditional product-centric launch model espoused by product managers or the venture capital community. Through trial and error, hiring and firing, successful startups all invent a parallel process to product development. In particular, the winners invent and live by a process of customer learning and discovery. I call this process “Customer Development,” a sibling to “product development,” and each and every startup that succeeds recapitulates it, knowingly or not. …The [Customer Development] model is a paradox because it is followed by successful startups, yet articulated by no one. Its basic propositions are the antithesis of common wisdom yet they are followed by those who succeed.”

~ Steve Blank

(By the way, loyal readers may be interested to know that Steve’s fourth start-up venture was a software company, e.piphany, which was an early pioneer in marketing automation—we reviewed epiphany’s products extensively.) These two illustrations from his book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany , summarize the differences between the traditional product development model and Steve’s customer development model:

The Traditional Product Development Model

© 2005-2011 Steven G. Blank

Illustration 1. Here’s Steve Blank’s Product Development Diagram (Figure 1.1.) from The Four Steps to the Epiphany .

The Customer Development Model

© 2005-2011 Steven G. Blank

Illustration 2. Here’s Steve Blank’s Customer Development Model. “Customer discovery focuses on discovering customers’ problems and needs. Customer validation on developing a sales model that can be replicated. Customer creation on creating and driving end-user demand, and company building on transitioning the organization from one designed for learning and discovery to a well-oiled machine designed for execution.” Steven Gary Blank, The Four Steps to the Epiphany , Chapter 2, p. 19.

As Businesses Mature, They Often Lose Customer- & User-Centricity

Once businesses become established and grow organically and/or through acquisition, many seem to lose their focus on customer development. Customer development often falls by the wayside. It’s no longer part of the organization’s core DNA. As the sales team and the marketing organization focus on the paying customers—the ones who write the checks (e.g., the CIO or the parent); they often forget to focus on the actual end-users and consumers of the solutions they offer (e.g., the email end-users or the kids who have to wear the clothes).

At the same time, as businesses mature, so do their internal systems and processes. Over time, these processes and systems ...