Tech Product Development: Deliver on Customer Needs

Product managers do not typically manage new product development. Yet you play a critical role in product success by discovering and defining the problems customers have and partnering with development teams to brainstorm solutions that deliver optimal customer value. Clear definitions of customer problems along with customer insights enable better collaboration between the relevant teams involved in product design and product development.

Given its importance, product managers in technology growth companies say they should spend the largest share of their time on problem discovery and solution validation. To uncover problems or solutions with the highest potential for customer value:

There is no shortage of opinions from stakeholders about the most important product features to deliver. Validate or counter those opinions with data about customer needs and expectations. Organizations need to equip product managers with the data sources and analytics tools that make robust analysis possible by:

• Assessing current data sources to determine whether product managers are making the best use of their current data sources and whether they need to source complementary data on current or emerging market dynamics. 

• Evaluating analytics tools to find ones that produce material improvement in how the data is analyzed.

• Engaging with customers and prospects through direct, unfiltered and regular interactions with customers and prospects. Don’t rely solely on sales or customer success for customer feedback.

In addition to providing greater business awareness and problem context to developers, product managers can also work with product owners to break requirements down into the smallest practical components, which have been demonstrated to lead to better estimations of effort, less rework and improved product quality. Another common best practice to reduce ambiguity is to specify the acceptance criteria for a feature in the form of a pass/fail test. When combined with a more context-aware engineering team, these practices result in faster time to market of a higher quality and better fit solution.

The user experience (UX) with the product and the more holistic customer experience (CX) across the organization are significant factors in product success. A product development process that does not consider UX and CX — and does not actively involve UX and CX experts — risks producing an end product that is irrelevant or unsatisfying to customers.

In the past, the product development process focused more on UX issues related to how people engaged with the product. Today, product development considerations should include all interactions that users and buyers have with a brand. That is both more extensive and more abstract than product managers are used to, leading to the view among product managers that building products with compelling experiences and understanding customer needs are your top two challenges.

To improve both, take the following three actions:

Use a framework such as Gartner’s CX maturity assessment model to assess the level of CX maturity on the product development team and establish a common understanding about where the gaps exist. The assessment helps communicate the business benefits of strong CX and sets the expectations for increasing maturity.

Similarly assess your team’s existing methods of understanding customer needs. These may include product analytics and voice-of-the-customer tools that collect customer feedback across interaction points and within products.

Measuring CX is distinct from measuring product and digital performance. Product analytics reveal usage and behavior patterns internal to a product, while digital experience analytics cover the product’s technical flow and design performance. CX analytics, in contrast, capture interactions that are external to the product across the customer journey. They can include ROI value calculators, recommendation engines and diagnostic tools.

To ensure you have both the right CX analytics and the right processes for capturing and using them during product development, product managers should embed CX analytics within product offerings. If you already have some CX analytics, refine your processes to fully leverage them. Use a gap analysis to assess which CX analytics tools are available to what you need.

Product managers must embrace collaboration with peers in product development and engineering, to ensure the new product development process delivers a timely and high-quality result. Product managers do not have direct authority over how the development function builds products. They can, however, align their ways of working with that of development and act as customer advocates to guide development and change when needed. Some ways to do that are:

Most product companies have adopted some flavor of Agile as their software development methodology. Product managers, however, do not always understand Agile practices or the underlying principles, and their role in an Agile organization is often unclear. This can hinder collaboration.

To play a more effective role in technology product design and development, product managers should develop knowledge of Agile principles and practices. This allows you to effectively synchronize the rest of your work with Agile teams. Adopting complementary practices to the ones used by engineering and development increases the effectiveness of continuous discovery and validation efforts. When the product team identifies new opportunities, problems and customers, you can quickly insert those findings into the work already underway with engineering and development. Adopting the same practices and principles also allows product managers to review and validate development work with actual customers to ensure it delivers customer value — for example, by using the Lean and Agile-based minimum viable product (MVP) concept to validate solutions in process and mitigate the risk of product failure.