Focus on the Customer

Quite often product management is focused on the product/solution that is taken to market.  I would argue that it is not the product that is important.  It is the customer.  Unless you have a very clear understanding of the customer context in the market that you are trying to address, you have a solution looking for a problem, which inevitably leads to failure in the worst case, unnecessary resource (cash) consumption and delayed success in the likely case.



In these challenging economic times, many organisation are struggling to find ways to differentiate themselves in the market, and are getting bogged down trying to define exactly what their value proposition is for their target customers. Quite often the focus is on firstly themselves and secondly on their product.  Quite often management misses the point – it is not about your product or your organisation.  It is about customers, and there is a basic source of information that must not be overlooked - your own customers.

Product management is primarily about understanding the customer ecosystem, the customer challenges, and identifying which problems are there to be solved. Once this is understood you can build the business case for providing a solution. What differentiates organisations that fail at innovation, from those that succeed, is how they approach building the business case... They avoid “death by analysis”.  There is certainly a requirement for analysis, and building a good business case.  But there is a big But ..

The danger of doing too much analysis, is that by the time you are finished (a) the market has passed you by and (b) when the results come in, you realise that the forecasts that you were basing your analysis on, were flights of fancy and were nowhere close to what you predicted.  There is a fine line between building a really detailed business case that has every scenario covered, and one that has just enough analysis.  Guess which one will be the better?  Neither I would argue.  The best business case is built on customer centric information not your product forecasts and predictions.

Anybody that has spent some time pondering on how to improve the performance of an existing product, or trying to figure out whether their idea for a new product is a winner, will know that it helps to have a framework as a reference with which you can begin to attack the problem.  Are frameworks used?  Most of the time it would seem that in business this problem seems to be approached quite randomly (certainly this has been the case in many that I have seen).

This blog starts out as my ponderings on this topic – what is the best way to focus specifically on the customer, and what are the available frameworks to use? I am sure that there will be a whole lot of other stuff as well and it will change over time.

It’s all about coming along for the ride.