I’m sure by now we all know most of the tech product companies out there call themselves customer-obsessed or customer-centric companies. Let’s break that down and put a scientific approach to keeping up customer obsession and delivering on what customer needs and wants.
Before I write a word, I want to set my baselines in terms of what type of business I am talking about.
In the world of product management, you will often hear these buzz words: requirements, problem statement, user stories, use cases, customer paint points, user needs, prioritization, UX, mockups, and a few more. Almost everything you do as a product manager involves one or more of these activities. As a successful product manager, you must be well versed in what these mean and how they come to life in your day-to-day activities when performing the role of a product manager.
The ability to hear vague customer pain points from multiple channels/sources and translate those into more specific and scalable solutions that are prioritized to make the best use of resources and deliver the biggest impact is probably the true art of a cross-functional product manager.
So the bigger question is how do you successfully do that to meet the needs and wants of your customers/users?
Let me share a real-life example of how I successfully delivered a solution that was scalable, met the needs of the existing customers, and also acted as a selling point for the company to acquire new customers.
Before I start let me set the context and baselines:
- The project I was working for already had an existing platform with b2b customers. However, the platform presented significant gaps when I came in as a product manager to convert those product gaps to meet the major use cases and market needs. This conversion involved a certain level of prioritization ( to be discussed below.)
- The product was a hotel booking/ reservation product. Our customers were the actual hotel owners who used our product to make it possible for their guests (aka users of our product) to find rooms, check for availability, and reserve rooms all online. Hotels owners used our ready-to-go platforms because they didn’t have the capacity to build their own platforms. Hence, my company addressed this market gap and provided the platform to the hotel owners in return, receiving an agreed fee or a percentage of sales.
Now let’s dig deeper into the details…
For the scope of my project, my customer (a hotel owner) came to address a product gap that was hurting their revenue. They wanted a solution, that would help retain their guests, and also increase their revenue.
The product statement was vague and unclear. They asked for a solution so that they could offer multiple nights to their customers. The product was only allowing one free night per reservation.
Now, this is where a product manager comes into play, to find more specifics about the problem and ideate a solution that is beneficial to the customers and his business as well.
Approach:
Step 1: Gap Analysis
When I heard about the problem from my customer, I went back to the platform and start reviewing the specific features related to our customers’ pain points. After a little bit of research, analysis, and user testing, I was able to find not just the specific gaps in the product but also the scope of the existing features within the product. I was doing this analysis to verify if my developers needed to make code changes because that would have a direct impact on the cost my company would incur.
Step 2: Discovery
I scheduled a requirement discovery session with my customer. To prepare, I noted down a list of questions, which had direct and indirect relations to customers’ requirements. I asked these questions to find the specifics of the requirements As I started to hear the feedback about the pain points, it became very clear what outcome the customer was looking for.
Step 3: Refinement
I wrote down the user stories after getting a full knowledge of what customer needs were. The user stories looked at the customer pain point from the hotel owners’ point of view. The user stories brought more specificity to the gap. In the beginning, the problem looked linear from a high level, but as I started to dive deep, the problem looked much more diverse. One user story turned out to be four user stories.
Step 4: Prioritization and Scaling:
After the user stories were identified to me, I had to prioritize those based on a number of factors: revenue, impact, usage, etc. However, more importantly, I had to prioritize solutions that were scaleable. So, how did I discover a scalable solution from a single customer pain point? When the customer requested to build a feature to allow them to provide multiple free nights to their guests, they didn’t specify how many. Did they want to give one free night, two free nights, or more? Although the customer asked for the option of 2 free nights, I had to look at the bigger picture. What if another customer comes in tomorrow and asks for 3 free nights feature? Do we pull out resources again? Why not just innovate the existing feature in such a way so that any customer can customize the number of free nights they want to give to their guests.
Step 5: Designing & Solutioning (Coming Soon!)
Step 6: Development and Launch (Coming Soon!)