Customer discovery is a balancing act Part I - Discovery is already there

This week I've been reading a lot about customer discovery, which I think is one of the most important things you can do to focus your business, feature development or even internal development projects better. In this blog post series I'll try to list some of my favourite insights about customer discovery. First one is more about what is already there and usually is already gathered, and how can it be used in product management. The second one is more in-depth methods I really have loved during feature development. These are both more about software development, but can be applied regardless of industry.

Balancing with biasing

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All the companies I know, have been doing customer discovery in one way or another, even if they don't realize it. Customer information just floods from doors and windows, but it's biased if not communicated, questioned or analyzed properly.  The biasing can be affected from everything, the situation,  the persona or even the way questions are asked. During training sessions it's usually all the positive "how easy it is to use!" or  "this could be used here and there to streamline the processes" - just because of the wow-effect from seeing the product in use for the first time.  From the sales it's usually the customer's current processes that need to be solved just as it was solved with the previous software or method - because it worked and no matter how much better this solution would be, customers don't necessarily want to change the way they work, not even the small things.

These both are good sources for customer discovery, but the discussion inside the company might prove harder than you think. I've seen a lot of companies that already use customer discovery in marketing and sales. Actually I think that there aren't any that do not have this. For some reason the same methods and tools aren't used in software development. Why?

Marketing already does it...

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Let's start from the beginning. In the essence marketing is all about getting the interest of paying customers so that they become leads for sales. For the marketing to work, the marketing needs targeting and knowledge on the customers. Where our customers are? What is important to our customers? How would we benefit our customers? How our marketing campaigns could be more efficient? It's about empathizing with customer - tracking and analyzing all the experiments. It's all about continuously tracking the customer visits and their conversions throughout the funnel. Most marketing departments use myriad of tools to get data about how customers use the websites, how the e-mail campaigns work, how the social media marketing is working, how the website is being used and so on. The exact same tools can be used in software products in the same way.

Your marketing knows a lot of really cool tools to get insight on how your customers use your products. Even as far as getting anonymous screen recordings, heatmaps, statistics, drop-offs, button usage, ghost MVP's, A/B-testing etc. To name a few Hotjar, Mixpanel, Amplitude and even Google analytics. Personally I use Hotjar in this blog to take anonymous recordings on users that show how they are reading the articles, where they click and how much they scroll. Just to improve the article contents and blog layout so that it would be as easy as possible to click to the places where I want to click and also to keep people reading! Recently I've added a couple of channels to improve the content and availability of content and monitor the drop-offs or conversion funnels. It's something every marketing guy does, just make sure that GDPR is adhered and privacy is embraced. All this can be done without collecting private data.

... Sales already does it ....

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Sales are the key guys in the company to know about customer processes. Especially if it's B2B solution sales. They can straight away say a few of the key benefits that works for the customers. They also use CRM's to record their activities, monitor hitrates, monitor and improve lead quality. They target their sales with the marketing to the best fit areas just to close as many profitable deals as possible. They use interviewing a lot and generate a good clear picture of market, what sells, what prices can be applied, what is the market need and how the solution solves it. 

CRM's in general are really good measuring points for product management also. You can use sales as a medium to test market-fit by giving lists of assumptions to prove against customer needs, and it's instanteneous. These can then be measured against CRM numbers like hitrate. If hitrate increases after applying a key benefit in nice marketing material, it can be one of the most important thing for the customers and might be the best spot for further development. I know that many think that sales guys tend to oversell the perfection - It's just usually a matter of communicating and getting the company work as an agile unit to perfect the whole process. It might even be that the reason why customers buy, isn't the perfect product, but the overall service and feeling of the service during the customer relationship. I bet that the technically best product or best UX doesn't necessarily win, but how the company makes the customer feel and how it solves their problems in total.

... Support also does it...

Also one great place for automated customer discovery is your own customer support. The frontline where people call to get advice on the situations at hand. Customer support usually measures ticket counts, time to solve the problems etc. From there you can get insight on the most fragile parts of the software and can even get good feedback on developing new features. These should be processed accordingly so that the best ideas will proceed to further development. Support is a great place to do interviews with most problematic features and get direct feedback on customer's processes just to by talking to customer about their processes. The data is there, just know how to use it!

... but production forgets it?

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When companies aren't aligned to lean development, software guys just do what product/project managers ask. They are professionals in developing and knowing the in-depth technology in everything, they know how to do things so that they are sustainable, they can perfect the whole release pipeline and do all stuff that's like magic!

And yes, they are not the guys who really care about customer understanding - they just need to know enough. Still as a product manager I'd love to see the same kind of status on developed features. Is the idea good at all? How many early adopters take the new feature into use? How do they use it? Can it be eased? UX/UI/CX guys inside development team are a godsend gift for all product managers, they want to create something beautiful and easy to use. At best they act as medium to challenge the engineers in development with a hint of empathy towards customer experience.

Anything that can be used in marketing, sales or support, can be used in production and to direct the production to the right things. Just use the data wisely and implement - if at all possible - measurements for the new features. Try to find critical success metrics and KPI's to the development just to see whether it's really the right thing to do. Also try to brainwash the guys not to perfect everything to diamond, usually it's better to proof cheap than to create several months before releasing a failed feature.

I've come across with this situation numerous times, and it's usually the product managers job to be the glue between these departments. It's a tough job to please everyone, but in the end, you're serving the customer and talking to the whole company. You're in the position to align them by leading them through trust and insight, just remember that you're surrounded with experts that want to do their best job on the task at hand - be the glue and help them succeed with the discovery they already do!