Which Customer?

Everyone agrees that it's good to listen to  what your customer wants. But which customer should you be listening to? This can be a surprisingly difficult question to answer, and getting it wrong can have unfortunate consequences.

Most companies have many types of customers. They can be sorted according to purchasing power, loyalty, enthusiasm, early/late adopter, knowledge, purchase frequency, and many other characteristics. You can also add in potential customers, who are often the key to success, but you may not even know who they are yet.

Some customers will let you know what they want. Some are articulate. Some are loud or persistent. Some are brutally honest, while others try to ingratiate themselves by telling you how great you are. Others, you will never, ever hear from.

There are several traps that the most well-intentioned people can fall into. Here are some customers that we're always tempted to listen to, and then try to please:
  • The squeaky wheel. This is the person who complains the loudest and most frequently. We want them to be happy, and sometimes we want to satisfy them so that they'll be quiet.
  • The fattest wallet. This is the customer that Sales wants to please, for obvious reasons. But making one fat wallet happy may mean disappointing hundreds of other customers.
  • The most recent customer. After you (or your CEO) talks to an articulate, thoughtful customer, it's tempting to take her ideas and start working on them. Regardless of whether or not her ideas should really be your top priority.
  • The most customers. This one's tricky. Let's say you get emails from hundreds of customers about an idea, far more than about any other issue. It must be important, right? Well, it may be safe to assume it's important to customers who write emails, but is that who you have to please to succeed? And does a chorus of agreement even mean that this issue is really the most important issue to these people?
Who do you listen to?

The single most important thing you can do is identify, and remember, who your target customers are. These are the people that you must satisfy in order to succeed. You need to understand their needs, their desires, and even their personalities. Picking your target customers is central to developing any product. There are many factors to consider, including things like customer need, the competitive landscape, readiness to purchase,  pricing factors, access to sales channels, geography and culture, etc.  It's an ongoing process - customers change, the market changes, and you have to continually readjust your target.

Once you know who you have to satisfy, in priority order, you need to keep this in mind whenever you seek or evaluate customer input. Go ahead and gather information from all kinds of people, but be sure to weigh the results according to your priorities. The most effective thing that you can do, though, is talk to the most important customers in the first place. Your time is limited and valuable - spend it with the people that you need to hear from.

However carefully you plan your research, you will still run into different personality types and people who care about very different things. That's good, as long as you can balance their input wisely. Don't let the squeaky wheel lead you away from the quieter wheels - they matter too. This is particularly important in a focus group or online forum - strong personalities can influence or intimidate less-forceful people, and it's up to you to ensure that these folks have a voice.

It's important to prioritize what you hear. Often, different types of customers will have very different priorities. By asking customer s to rank their preferences in a questionnaire or in-person "$100 test," you'll get a good idea what they consider most valuable. You may find that, for example, your top-priority customer's second highest need is the most important feature for all your other customers, and decide to make that feature your development priority.

No matter who you are listening to, it's important that you, as a product manager, don't take people's words at face value. Don't fall into the trap of doing what the customer says. It's your job to understand what's behind the customer's words and requests, and interpret them. Figure out what the customer's problems and desires are, whether or not they can articulate them. A request for one thing may actually be hiding a need for something very different.

Finding the right customers, then getting inside their heads, is the essence of great product management. Identify.  Listen. Interpret. Understand. Then act.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Agile Thinking

Agile development processes have had a pretty big impact on product management. An agile product manager has to be adept at bringing clear customer requirements into an iterative development context. This can be a terrific opportunity for product management and engineering to innovate during the development process. But I've found that this kind of agile approach can be applied to a more traditional development process, too. In an agile world, a product manager (often serving as product owner, as well) is responsible for delivering customer requirements in the form of use cases as the team goes through a series of rapid development cycles. The product design may change after (or even during) each of the sprints, so the PM is responsible for restating the customer requirements in the new context, as well as creating new use case examples. All the while, the PM must keep the product vision and goals at the forefront. In a traditional "waterfall" development process, the...
Read more

Just Saying "No"

"No" can be the toughest word to say. Nobody likes to hear it. Executives generally hate to be told "no." But sometimes it's the most valuable word in a product manager's vocabulary, especially when it makes "yes!" possible. You can't build all your ideas, so someone has to say no to some of them. That means saying yes to the right ones. Any good product development organization has more good ideas than it can possibly execute. Sometimes the ideas come from executives, sometimes from engineers, sometimes from customers and sometimes from product managers. It's the product manager's job to understand the company's business, the market situation, the customers, and potential customers well enough to make a case for what gets a yes or no (or a "later"). Each case will involve many factors - business goals, investment issues,  sales considerations, competitive conditions, technology opportunities and development resources - ...
Read more

Consistency vs. Innovation

One of the most vexing user experience questions is: When must applications be consistent with each other? When is it OK to invent news ways of doing things that require users to relearn established methods? There is rarely an easy answer, but a Product Manager can play an important role in making these decisions. Most of us assume that it's a good thing when a mouse click performs the same action in different applications. Few of us miss the bad old days when every word processor had its own conventions, and there were no Windows interface guidelines and web interaction conventions. De facto standards have been created by successful products and suites, such as Microsoft Office and the Adobe suites. If you've learned one application, you've learned most of what you need to know to use another. But product designers are constantly confronted with opportunities to do things in a better , but different way. Is consistency an inviolable "must", or, as the saying ...
Read more