Customer validation is a crucial step in building a successful product or service. It helps you test your assumptions, find your target market, and get feedback from real users. But how do you use that feedback to improve your product or service? How do you iterate based on customer validation? In this article, you will learn some practical tips and strategies to help you do just that.
Iteration is the process of making changes to your product or service based on customer feedback and data. It involves creating, testing, and learning from different versions of your solution until you find the one that meets your customers' needs and expectations. Iteration is not a one-time event, but a continuous cycle that allows you to adapt to changing customer preferences and market conditions.
AIRBNB is a great example of how customer feedback on an MVP creates success. Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia moved to San Francisco where they shared a three-room-apartment. When a design conference came to town in 2007, they saw an opportunity to earn some extra money by renting out their floor space, and called it Airbed and Breakfast. After two years of experimenting and failing, they focussed on New York as a popular tourist destination and had meetings with their New York-based users: —both hosts and guests. These meetings were crucial in making solid offerings with that included professional pictures of good-looking spaces. The basis of success of AIRBNB, was laid fifteen years ago, when the founders connected to their users.
Iteration is important because it helps you validate your product or service with real customers, not just your own assumptions or opinions. It also helps you avoid wasting time and resources on features or functions that customers don't want or need. By iterating based on customer validation, you can increase your chances of creating a product or service that solves a real problem, delivers value, and satisfies your customers.
You can also learn better how to measure progress and what means to be successful in each iteration. In particular to measure to your prior version of yourself
Collecting customer feedback is essential to the development of your product or service, and there are various methods you can employ depending on your stage of development, goals, and resources. Surveys can be used to ask customers or potential customers about their needs, preferences, satisfaction, or suggestions for improvement. Interviews can be conducted to understand their pain points, motivations, behaviors, and expectations. Observations can help you understand how they interact with your solution and what they like or dislike. Finally, experiments can be run to test different aspects of your product or service and measure the results with tools like Google Analytics or Optimizely.
Open-ended questioning is a particularly powerful technique in collecting genuine customer feedback. Rather than pushing customers to a predefined answer, open questions encourage them to share their thoughts freely, often uncovering deeper insights. By asking "How do you currently handle this?" instead of "Would you pay for our solution?" we get a clearer picture of their existing challenges. Similarly, instead of asking "Do you like our product?", inquiring about their current processes can reveal the pain points our product might address. This approach prioritizes understanding their real-world experiences and needs over seeking mere validation.
Once you have collected customer feedback, it's important to analyze it in order to identify patterns, insights, and opportunities for improvement. To do this, you can use various techniques such as quantitative analysis, which involves measuring and evaluating the performance of your product or service using numerical data. Tools like Excel or Tableau can be used to visualize and interpret this data. Qualitative analysis is also useful for understanding the emotions, opinions, and stories of your customers through non-numerical data like comments, ratings, reviews, or testimonials. NVivo or Dedoose are great tools for coding and categorizing this data. Finally, synthesizing both quantitative and qualitative data can create a comprehensive and holistic view of your customers, their needs, and their feedback. Affinity Diagrams or Customer Journey Maps are great tools for organizing and displaying this data.
After analyzing customer feedback, it's important to prioritize it in order to decide which changes to make to your product or service. To do this, you can use different frameworks, such as Impact vs Effort, MoSCoW, and RICE. Impact vs Effort allows you to rank feedback based on the impact it will have on customers and your business, as well as the effort it will take to implement it. MoSCoW allows you to classify feedback based on urgency and importance. RICE allows you to score feedback based on Reach, Impact, Confidence, and Effort. A matrix, list, table, spreadsheet or dashboard can be used to track and compare feedback according to these frameworks so that you can focus on the ones that have high impact and low effort or high RICE scores.
Finally, to create and test new versions of your product or service, you need to implement customer feedback. Prototyping is one way to do this, where you can create low-fidelity or high-fidelity prototypes of your product or service using tools like Figma or InVision. Alternatively, you can create a minimum viable product or service using tools like WordPress or Shopify. You can also use an agile or lean approach to develop your product or service in small and frequent increments, rather than in large and infrequent batches. With these tips and strategies, you can iterate based on customer validation and create a product or service that meets their needs and expectations. Keep in mind that iteration is not linear or static; it's dynamic and cyclical. Therefore, it's important to continuously collect, analyze, prioritize, and implement customer feedback to improve your product or service and grow your business.
Build always a customer journey and iterate. Feedback should then be incorporated to adjust the journey for your product or service