Going Beyond Requirements And Understanding Real Customer Needs

A typical product development process is shown below.

We develop requirements that we think represents customer needs and work with engineering to develop the product. When our target customers/users evaluate our products we are often surprised by their negative feedback (e.g. "this is not what I wanted"). So what happened here? The product was built as per the requirements and yet it did not resonate with our customers/users.

To solve this problem we need to go beyond the traditional requirements statements and develop deep customer insights by asking the question.."What is the problem that the customer/user is hiring our products to solve?"

The product development process then morphs to:

The Why represents the real needs/the problem the customer/user is trying to solve, the What represents the requirements and the How represents the implementation. Therefore developing a strong understanding of the reason/problem (Why) will enable us to discover and  develop products that address those needs. Marty Cagan of Silicon Valley Product Group writes in his blog post (Requirements Are Not)... "Our only real requirement is to discover product solutions that work well for our users, our customers and our business".

The requirements then become a lens through which we interpret the real needs. 

So make sure to go up the chain of needs by asking why multiple times so that you can identify the real need/goal. You might then realize that the original requirements were insufficient and you have additional requirements to consider to develop a solution that would resonate with your customers/users. 

Thoughts/Comments?

Goal-Oriented Design

In order to effectively discover and deliver solutions that resonate with your customers it is important to go beyond the needs (e.g requirements) they express and  understand the goals they are trying to accomplish.

The agile user story format is effective for capturing these needs and goals:

As a role I need to be able to do this such that I can accomplish this goal

Here is an example:

As a user I need to be able to upload pictures such that I can share them with friends & family

Taking the goals into account allows us to really understand what the user is trying to do (e.g. share pictures) and the associated pain points (e.g. take a picture, then download to computer and then upload to online photo sharing application) with an existing solution and develop effective alternate solutions that truly resonate.  Take the example of the iPhone. It allows you to take a picture and easily share it with others.

Building Products That Resonate

Customers are hiring products to solve a need. Therefore the products that resonate with your users are the ones that address their needs. So how do you then go about building products that resonate?  …Focus on design projects that improve people’s lives.

"Ways To Grow" is a useful tool that can be applied to innovation projects and while it is similar to the Product/Market Grid, which focuses on existing markets or new markets for the existing products/new products being considered, the “Ways to Grow” tool emphasizes that markets consists of real people and innovation must focus on them. 

The authors (Ryan Jacoby and Diego Rodreiguez) warn that innovation must not just address the functional aspect of the users problem but should also address visceral and reflective design and provide us with “Innovation Outcomes Grid”, another tool to map out what kinds of teams and process will be needed to deliver the right innovation strategy.

Personas and Goal-Oriented Design are other forms of user-focused design tools used in the industry to ensure products being resonate with users.