September 3rd, 2003
The Importance of Customer Focus - Creating Products that Customers
Speaker: Geoffrey Huckleberry, Senior Director of Product Management, Instill

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Geoff Huckleberry, Senior Director of Product Management at Instill, spoke to a large audience on Customer-focused product management at the July 9th meeting of the SVPMA. Geoff opened with the challenge of product management: you have lots of accountability but no authority and must influence people with lots of authority but little accountability to support your decisions. Customer knowledge is the key to success.

Customer knowledge allow you to focus, developing the attributes that will contribute most to the product's success and convince others of your product decisions. Further, it lets you identify new opportunities and stay ahead of the competition. To understand a customer you must know what they are trying to accomplish, their affinity for technology, their prioritization of activities, their pain points, their environment, and what works for them and what doesn't. How do you know when you have customer knowledge? It is when you know what a target customer will say before they do.

Geoff then presented eight key success factors that he has developed over his 11 years in product management at fortune 500 companies such as Intuit, CCH Incorporated, and American Express as well as start-up ChemConnect. The first key success factor Geoff spoke of is to begin with the end in mind. He emphasized the importance of creating a customer research plan outlining the objectives, decisions to be made from the research, target profile, methodology, and key questions. By knowing where you are going, you will avoid getting vague or useless feedback. Geoff gave an example of a focus group where he created the findings presentation ahead of the meeting. The slides only had the chart templates because the values needed to come from the research. But Geoff knew how he wanted to present the findings, which then let him know the correct questions to ask and data to capture.

Plan for research even under tight deadlines is key success factor two. Because getting it right early focuses the effort and keeps to project on track through delivery. Otherwise, errors get multiplied as the project moves through development, marketing, sales, and implementation. Also, do not substitute second hand feedback in place of customer research. Sales, client services, and support each have biases based on their roles and interactions with the customer. Only direct feedack will let you translate customer needs into engineering requirements and make tough tradeoff decisions.

The third key success factor requires tightly defining your target. Your research will then be predictive of the market response and customer satisfaction will rise. This is particularly important in situations where there is a gatekeeper between you and the actual user. Although the gatekeeper's needs must also be met, be it the economic buyer or IT, it would be foolhardy to design a product based only on their interpretation of the user's needs. You have to speak to actual users.

Key success factor four tells us to focus on delivering value and NOT technology. The reason for this is most customers are trying to accomplish a task and that is what they care about. Further, focusing on the value results in a more intuitive solution. If the technology is too advanced, it will only get between the user and their objective.

Geoff advised focusing on the basic user first and then the power user in key success factor five. This gives you broader market penetration, requires less effort, and therefore results in superior financial performance. As you add features to satisfy the power users in subsequent releases, it is important to keep the user experience uncluttered for the base user. Turn the power features into configuration options or place off the main screens. The power user will find where the advanced features are. But place your base user in front of an advanced feature screen, and they will not know where to start. This is important because as you move through the adoption curve, the number of unsophisticated users will grow faster than power users.

Key success factor six tells us not to get defensive, rather, seek actionable learning. In particular, negative vocal leaders who are in your target group represent one of the greatest opportunities for product and financial improvement. First, really angry customers often have the best clue of what they are trying to accomplish and their needs are probably typical of the larger customer base. Further, if you can get them on board by correcting the product, they will become vocal advocates and your best sales person.

The seventh key success factor is to be customer focused, not customer compelled. Catering to every customer desire does not let you make the appropriate trade-offs between customer and financial success and may alienate your core users. Geoff used the example of Southwest Airlines, which regularly ignores its top three complaints: meals, curbside check-in, and assigned seating. Southwest eliminated these benefits to deliver on two more highly valued airline attributes: on-time arrival and inexpensive fares.

The last of the key success factors, number eight, addressed including your competitor's customers in your research. This will enable you to understand your perceived weaknesses and your competitor's weaknesses. You can use this information to improve your own product, extend an advantage, and position against the competitor's product.

Geoff added a few extra points to consider, such as have customers quantify answers where possible, get your customers to open up by flagging your discussion as research, and avoid brining anyone such as sales or client services to an interview since they might want to cover up a weakness. Following this advice along with the eight key success factors will give you the influence you need in your organization to deliver exceptional products and achieve superior financial results.