What’s the shortest path between your ideas and real customer value?
Great products aren’t launched – they’re revealed.
From Charles Dickens’ serialised novels through to the evolution of medical tech, we’ve long understood that the most successful products emerge incrementally.
Iterative design isn’t new, but it is often under-used.
Do you ever find your business or teams:
- letting specifications overshadow the need they exist to serve?
- missing opportunities for real world customer feedback?
- opting for one big launch rather than frequent smaller deliveries to users?
Of course some initiatives, especially safety critical and highly regulated environments, demand meticulous planning and control.
But in more dynamic markets where we could deliver something useful sooner and don’t, it raises the risk of a product ‘miss’ and it can inadvertently reduce the agility of our business.
A timeless principle
Modern software development emphasises the principle of “prioritising customer satisfaction by delivering early and often”.
No surprise really, but when this principle was coined 25 years ago, achieving ‘early and often’ in IT was more of a challenge than it is now. This principle can still guide businesses today in contexts beyond its technical origin.
Understanding customer satisfaction
Is sometimes harder than it sounds. Written 40 years ago, Kano’s Product Model remains a practical and valuable framework to navigate this space.
Know your product in detail, know where each feature falls in this model, and know what the competition is doing.
Kano categorised customer needs of a product into:
- Basic needs: without these, dis-satisfaction is guaranteed. A hotel room without a clean bed, for example. So first, ensure these.
- Performance needs: generally linear – the more the better. EV: 300 miles per charge satisfies more than a car that does 250, and 400 miles is better still. Maximise these.
- Exciters/delighters: the unexpected crowd pleaser. Face ID on smartphones wasn’t really needed but it was widely appreciated when it arrived. This is a great way to build brand affiliation. Set time aside to explore and periodically add these (they’re not easy).
- Indifferent needs: Some aspects of a product are merely tolerated. Think of anything overly complex or with features rarely used; for most customers these don’t create any product enjoyment. Justify such features by ensuring they genuinely align with known customer needs, and consider reducing any that mainly create indifference.
- Reverse needs, or detractors: These are actively disliked by most customers. A supermarket recently removed their self-service checkouts citing this feedback – it was a feature of shopping that diminished the overall experience for their demographic – consuming the customer’s good will. Often the detractors are buried deep in the product and take time to be revealed. Know these deeply as your users do and eliminate them.
Early beats fast
They sound synonymous, but ‘fast’ often leads to costly shortcuts, rework or even chaos.
Instead, choose early.
Early – means without unwanted delays, and at the soonest opportunity to give at least some customers a new element of value. Often, early real-world feedback is the value that’s needed – to find out if you’ve even built the right thing.
Over absolute speed, instead seek predictability. Aim short and practice landing delivery until it becomes second nature. This will develop trust with customers, and help your product development teams run sustainably over the long term.
Often – show your products are adapting and evolving, responding to customer needs and wants. These needs change over time, so frequent enhancements will allow you to refine your offering to carry on meeting them.
How often is often?
Importantly, choose what ‘often’ means for your context.
If stability is valued and one upgrade a year is appropriate, that’s fine. But challenge the status quo; maybe customers have never had the option of anything else.
Could you better serve their needs by increasing frequency without creating unwanted disturbance?
By unpacking what it really means to deliver early and often, with focus on genuine needs, we can see how customer satisfaction and agility are two sides of the same coin.
About Martin Lambert
The business is Agiliqui Consulting. It rhymes with ‘agility’, which describes the core service offering: increasing the agility of how an enterprise achieves its outcomes.
Martin is a consultant-coach who helps solve the internal and potentially controllable problems that when attended to will improve ways of working and delivery effectiveness.
The USP – and complementary difference – to other business consultants, is expertise in adapting the principles of ‘agile’ as it was named in software to any context where something unique and emergent is being tackled.
In this fast changing and unpredictable world, responsiveness and adaptability means survival.
I partner with teams and leaders as needed to provide mentoring, training, advice and hands-on help tailoring the appropriate practices to increase this agility in your unique context.
The ideas, goals and strategies are yours; I partner in guidance on how to get there more effectively.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mclambert/
