Are you Customer Focused or Market Focused?

Within Product Management organizations, one of the largest mistakes I see made is being "customer focused." I know what you are thinking, "this guy is nuts," but hear me out. What most people think when we say customer focused is that we gather feedback from our customers and prioritize that feedback in our development efforts. Unfortunately, this leads to so many companies getting stuck 3 to 4 years into a growth cycle without being able to sell to any new customers.

The problem with being customer focused is structural fixedness. Structural fixedness is a cognitive bias or mental block where a person becomes so focused on the established structure or configuration of an object, idea, or process that they struggle to see alternative possibilities or uses for it. It prevents creative thinking by limiting the ability to reimagine how something could be modified, improved, or used in a different context. Thus, asking your customers for feedback will likely give you only slightly better ways to solve the problem that you are already solving.

For example, if someone is presented with a paper clip, they might only see it as a tool for holding papers together. Structural fixedness would make it difficult for them to imagine other uses, such as using the paper clip as a tool to pick a lock or to hold something in place. In addition, this phenomenon would have you focus on specific areas of your solution where a piece of feedback might actually apply to other areas of your solution.

So, how do you overcome this type of thing?

First, you need to ask your customer's a simple, clarifying question to every feature request. That is, Why? or better yet, What are you looking to solve for? Get them to articulate the business problem that they are attempting to resolve. I am willing to bet that if many of you went through your backlog of customer requests, very few would actually have a solid business outcome that you are able to articulate.

I know this because I recently took over a product management organization. My customer facing teams were clamoring because we had a long list of feature requests that product was attempting to get to, but were struggling to prioritize. The field simply wanted some transparency to the effort so that they could provide information back to their customers about when the feature would be added into the product.

I challenged the field team to first provide me with a business outcome for every feature request that they had in the backlog. Interestingly enough, this question alone essentially wiped out about 75% of the feature requests that they had already put into the roadmap. During this effort, I worked closely with the field teams to not only attempt to collect the business outcome from our customers, but also how to prioritize the customer feedback.

In addition to the above, we revamped our backlog and feature descriptions to define business outcomes within the feature. In other words, define the problem we were attempting to solve for. We also instituted a scoring mechanism. We asked the customers to rank, on a scale of 1-10 (10 being the largest), the impact of solving the business problem would have on their efforts. We then asked a follow up question, How satisfied are you with the current solution to this problem? (again, scale of 1-10, 10 being the most satisfied).

We called the difference between these two scores the Opportunity Score. We were able to quickly and easily see what problems would create the largest impact on for our customers and be able to focus our efforts on those things that they have not solved for.

This broke the structural fixedness problem for us because we were not asking our clients for a solution to the problem they had...we were simply asking them to describe the problems they were facing in their day to day efforts. This then allowed us to think larger about how to solve the issues that will actually move the product forward and help our customers solve the big problems that they were facing. Which in turn, unlocked growth for our business.

The thing I love about software and product management is that anything is possible. Unfortunately, many companies stall out because they get themselves into a cycle of letting the customers provide the solutions for them. This creates a phenomenon that I like to call "Navel Gazing." In other words, it forces the company into incremental improvements on the same issues...and often arises in a company hitting a plateau in their growth. If you are facing this today, ping me and we can talk about how to break through that issue for your business.