Introduction

Product teams face constant pressure from executives, customers, and shifting market forces. With so many competing voices, it’s easy to lose focus or chase the wrong priorities. Without a clear and trusted source of truth, teams risk wasting valuable time and resources on initiatives that don’t move the business forward. (see previous article)

Below are some example situations that may be creating a reactive product strategy in your organization:

Immature OKRs

Lack of mature OKRs focused more on outputs versus solving & delivering on real customer challenges

Sales pressures

Sales & pre-sales pressure from customers to add new features or customizations in order to close deals though it may not be a common market fit

Snowflake customizations

Building snowflake customizations or configurations during product implementation causing bloated support overhead and missing the benefit for wider customer usage

Tech modernization

Development leadership reluctance to modernize tech stack slowing time to market for desperately needed product improvements

Defect overhead

CX team reports on recurring customer defects where there may be a bigger challenge that requires a root cause analysis or broader changes in strategy

Misinterpreting requirements

Product teams misinterpreting context of customer business requirements

Generic customer feedback

Generic customer feedback creating misunderstandings in focus areas

Lack of human-centric approaches

Lack of centralized common personas & journey mapping around the end-to-end solution creating misunderstandings and confusion between global teams

01: Capturing context

How can you begin to pinpoint the most common understood issues affecting the user base?

Many organizations claim to be “customer-first,” but living up to that promise requires more than ad-hoc feedback collection. Customers must have both a clear incentive and the right context to share meaningful insights they can justify investing their time and resources in.

For example, customers may express frustrations with service delivery, but they often lack visibility into the upstream processes that cause those issues. Without structured research to capture that broader context, product teams risk solving symptoms instead of root causes.


Begin to ask internal stakeholders:

  • What are the recurring issues that product users keep running into?
  • What is the root cause that perpetuates the issues?
  • What is the frequency?
  • What are the dependancies the team should be aware of?
  • Can the team describe them in detail?
  • Has the team tried to solve it previously and failed?
  • How does the team prioritize and assign it to the appropriate teams?
  • How does the team categorize these to take appropriate action?

Interview and observe friendly customers and their product users.

In the analysis, evaluate the following:

  • Do we have the correct personas in the customer organization identified?
  • Are there multiple roles splitting the work load or one generalist doing it all?
  • Was the feedback aligned with internal stakeholders?
  • Where were the gaps between perspectives?
  • What were their priorities compared to internal priorities?
  • Where have the expressed concerns in the past and missed expectations?

02: Leveling the playing field

How might we challenge assumptions in a productive, non-threatening way?

Executives, sales teams, and customer-facing groups often compete to influence product direction. While each perspective has value, the loudest voice can dominate decision-making, leaving strategy vulnerable to bias.

A disciplined customer research program helps to level the playing field by grounding conversations in evidence, not opinions. When user research is consistently shared across the organization, teams can align around customer needs rather than internal politics.

03: Create focus

How might we cut through the white noise so the teams feel heard, but focus can be created to accelerate progress?

When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority & quality suffers. It's critical to have the right tools to create focus areas that build confidence, reduce risk & deliver impact.

Below are some example distractors:

The loudest leaders

Using a real world example for building a new "Dashboard"

The loudest leader may not have the full understanding of the lifecycle, challenges, and sihifts in behavior. A recent real world example encountered was a senior leader pushed for a reporting dashboard on the solution suite to help sell new regional customers, but when validating with customer decision makers in several forums over 3 months, they collectively saw very little value in it since they already had spent time/money on 3rd party software & teams to capture the full picture of their business. What they really needed was a universal aggregated solution that monitored insights. They needed a platform ecosystem solution, not a product level solution.

The loudest customers

Using a real world example for "custom requirement":

The biggest and loudest customers may not have the products long term interest in mind. A recent example comes to mind with a big EU bank. They had a proprietary requirement that didn't meet the needs of the rest of the NA and EU market & was based on an operating structure from the past 30+ years. The team had to decide if this would be worth supporting in a configuration, could benefit other customers or could we advise the customer on operational improvements? Every customer validation in the market provided insights that this was a unique requirement & would not be worth the investment to support and manage long term.

Dangers of a feature-only mindset

The Frankenstein effect

There is a balance between exciting new features to keep customers & close deals and the need to drive forward critical product experience improvements. When focus is only on quickly adding features guided by technical convenience, that "bolt on" or "stitched together" effect quickly becomes prevalent to users and creates UX and Tech debt over time.

04: Informing future growth

As the data is being synthesized across customers, what are the most common emerging themes rising to the top?


Below: Lifecycle Journey map illustrating orchestration of personas and prioritization of of critical points & opportunities

Opportunity examples:

Who is impacted the most frequently?

Where in the journey is the lowest customer sentiment conveyed with product users?

Where is there excessive manual entry?

Where are business processes failing for customers that need to be reevaluated?

Where is there confusion on instruction and messaging that could be improved?

Is the team witnessing an uptick in requests for key enhancements to meeting market need?

Is there a product gap in a region that is creating hesitation or slowing growth?

Is there a new emerging business opportunity identified that could be a key differentiator?

05: Prioritizing the future vision

How might organizations transition from being reactive to strategic partners?

  1. Leverage customer product user insights to help with roadmap prioritization on which initiatives will make the most customer impact short term and longer term.
  2. Make it part of the culture to monitor shifts in industry and behaviors, because it changes often...& fast.
  3. Include customer strategic partnerships to help guide future direction of the product or service.
  4. Schedule a recorded executive summary every few weeks with newly captured customer insights.
  5. Make the data internally available and accessible. Err on the side of caution when saving them to a single tool. Budgets tend to get cut, tooling changes over time, account access can be an unneeded overhead.
  6. Include the updates in a monthly newsletters, company all-hands, executive touch points, customer quarterly reviews as a reminder.

Consider these three common insight examples:

01: Insight

"We are seeing that 45% of customers in the EU market are being impacted by this new legal requirement."

01: Product Strategy Recommendation

We should explore with our current product users the level of market impact and how this change should best be integrated into the experience to optimize their operation. We can prioritize this for release by EoY.

02: Insight

"We are seeing 70% customers in North America run operations in a similar model."

02: Product Strategy Recommendation

Let's continue optimizing the product experience for the 70% majority, and continue validation testing with the other 30% to determine if differences are business critical or represent an opportunity for us to provide strategic guidance. We can focus on improving the top 3 jobs-to-be-done over the next several PI's.

03: Insight

"We are seeing a 30% uptick in needing this specific enhancement due to changing market behaviors in Asia."

03: Product Strategy Recommendation

Let's co-create the experience improvement with key customer partners to verify accuracy and encourage industry buy-in. We can target a release of an MVP by Q3.

Takeaways

People are & will continue to be at the very center of product and service experiences. Start with those people who use the experiences everyday. Clarity, direction & purpose will come naturally. Those common insights are catalysts that will help create a future vision and guide product strategy that meets customer expectations for years to come.

  • Leverage common personas and journey maps to create a shared global cross-functional team alignment on semantics, behaviors and opportunities
  • Cultivate real world user insights to identify focus areas & inform product strategy that will create meaningful business impacts
  • Prioritize customer inclusion in co-creation of future solutions to create buy-in & holistically sell more product
  • Create customer feedback loops to validate assumptions prior to development and release to mitigate risk

If you’d like to explore how user insights can help your organization strengthen strategy and accelerate outcomes, let’s connect.

Communicate

Want to learn more?

Let's chat more about how we can assist with your business challenges!
Reach out