How do you release products to your customers. What informs the solutions you come up with?
Great products start with the customer. By deeply understanding the customer and their needs today you are able to know the most important benefit you offer to your customer and thus tailor a solution that delivers that benefit.
I recently did the Working Backwards workshop for our product Paid - (pa-id.co)
All along our description on our Website has been
Paid is a customer loyalty platform that enables businesses to identify, attract and reward their most loyal customers through loyalty points and discount vouchers.
After the exercise it turns out that we exist to help Beauty and Fashion Retailers understand their shopper and preferences so they can help enjoy repeat repeat business and thus customer retention.
With this laid out, defining our product as a loyalty program is tunnel vision even though having a loyalty program helps achieve a part of this, it's one of the channels that we can use.
The importance of nailing your mission can't be understated, It also helps you identify success metrics (behavioral & subjective)
Previously we measured our success by how many points customers earned, and how often they shopped. To a great extent this achieves our mission however we're not able to quantify the increase in sales and thus our business model doesn't directly benefit from this.
Also to mention, this customer discovery has taken some time 3 years now. You need a lot of information about your customer and thus the more info you have about and from your customer the better placed you will be in answering the 5 questions in the workshop.
I have attached the link to the workshop file. You can use it with your teammates to answer the 5 questions working backwards from your customer. I hope you find this useful.
see link to the
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RypZVoJKbZ1PZFWKMcsj0_WovIaiJxnO/view?usp=sharing
[@Bomet S. Brian]
It's a conversation starter to achieve clarity and customer focus, We revise and make the idea better with each iteration
An interesting contribution but I note that you have not clearly defined your customer as you seem to suggest that your customers customer is your customer. As you mentioned you need to have a very crisp understanding of who your customer is and what pain you are relieving them of, if not you will never truly be able to scale your business.
I normally tell people that the pain Java solves for most of its customers, mostly women as all men need is a tree stump, is clean washrooms most of the other activities are just padding.
Thanks for sharing @william.nguru for sharing this. I agree 100%. Its actually important to understand that describing a product is not the same as describing a solution. Your product is a loyalty platform but your solution is help the merchants deliver greater value to their customers by get an in-depth understanding of their customer (why they buy what they buy, what inspire them and what inform their buying decisions). Do you remember the conversations we had about value proposition and why it has to mirror perceived value of the customer. The core product and the actual product @Enos - Mass Inspire @Kennedy Mumo @robert yawe