How to make Products that people want?

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When building software products and services (this probably applies to any non-software services as well, but I will stay in my lane!) how do you know people “want” them?

Do you just trust what the “expert” says in the team? or you just listen to the opinion of the loudest person in the room?

Even though we want to be agile and “test” and “learn” what users or customers want, but we still need to do some homework to make sure we are kind of aiming in the right direction with the service or product that we are building!

Value Proposition Design

To make the odds of your idea a little better (According to Harward Business Review, most of the product launches fail!) one of the key differentiators is paying attention to “Value” and be clear about what is the Value that we are offering to our users!

First step in this journey is to really observe the customers and find out who they are and try to “Profile” them!

Just a side not here, none of these are done in isolation or in silos! We work in a team and reach to all of these customer profile and value propositions as a team! This is not something that say for example a marketing person would go to their room for a few days and come out and make a document and email it to you! You build all this with collaboration!

To do customer profile, you can start brainstorming about three different things on your customer profile:

Customer Activities, Customer Struggles, Customer Benefits

Customer Activities:

Activities are the things that users do in their day to day life! Now the “Value” we offer can make that activity a little better for them or solve a problem for them or make the activity that they are doing a little less risky!

We need to find these activities out for our customers and list them all to be clear which part of these activities we are trying to be involved in and we are trying to provide “Value” for customers!

Customer Struggles:

Here are some sample questions you can use to find out what are the things your customers struggle with the most:

What is considered as “Expensive” for your users? Or what is considered “Too hard to do” for them?
What is it that annoys the hell out of your users?
What solution from the current offers (from yours or other competitions) your users hate that you want to address?
Are you trying to address a risk for your customers? Are your customers taking risks at the moment that you want to eliminate it for them?
What is the thing that worries your customer the most that they keep thinking about it when alone in their car or in the shower?
What are some of the mistakes that your users make?
Why wouldn’t customers accept the “Value” you are offering? Is it too expensive? Do they not trust you?

Customer Benefits:

We also need to find out what is the benefit that our customer is looking to gain!

Benefits are the things that customer requires or expects to get! These gains can be of different kinds from functional gain, good feelings and emotions or savings some money!

We also need to brainstorm a little to find out how would our customer benefit. Here are some sample questions that could help with brainstorming:

Would your customer prefer saving in time? money? effort?
do your customer expect premium quality or doesn’t matter and they just want the job done?
Do your customer value performance or quality or availability? what is it that your customers care about the most? what is their expectation?
What can make your customer’s job a little smoother?
What makes your customers look good socially? do they care about that social aspect of your service?
What are your customers more into? good design? brand name? guarantees? accessibility? cheap price?
What do you think your customer would consider “a huge relief” for them?
What would your customers consider a success or failure?
Does your customer care more about quality or price or ease of use, features?

Value Proposition

Now that we did all the brainstorming with the team to find out who are our customers and what they are trying to do and what they care about the most, we need to start on brainstorming about the “Value” we intend to provide:

This will have three parts:

List all of our Services and Products
Find out which one of these services would “Benefit” our Customers
Find out which one of these services would address any “Struggles” of our customers

What we are trying to do here is to see if there is a “FIT” between what we identified as Customers Struggles and Benefits that they are seeking and making sure that, what we intend to offer addresses those customer expectations!

In other words, the services and products that we offer would “FIT” our customers and get them excited about the “value” that we offer when we address what the customer is trying to do, we offer some services or products to relief their “Struggles” or have some “Benefits” for them.

With all this activity, we are trying to strive to offer products and services that is a FIT for our customers that we profiled and target!

Now remember we are operating in this Agile and Lean context and we are just guessing, trying to experiment and learn, and at the end of all this we might have missed it and customers didn’t really care about our products and services in the first try!

Out customers will be the judge, the jury, and executioner of the “Value” that we offer. They will not have any merci if we don’t get the Benefits, Struggles and the FIT right!

But if it didn’t work, we re-group, re-think our profile, pains and gains, and try again with different customer profiles, and different products and services that hopefully, this time there will be a FIT!

So we continue this infinite cycle until we find a FIT:

Design => Test => Repeat

If you are developing a software product, I recommend getting his User Story Mapping book:

User Story Mapping by: Jeff Patton

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Cheer!