Gaining a Holistic View of the Customer
I find that often one of the issues that bubbles to the surface when dealing with developing new products is an organizational silo view of the customer. Support has a perspective of the customer based on their dealings with them, and so does development and marketing. Typically product managers engage in customer visits to try and gain a more complete picture of the customer. These visits are important for the product manager to see the customer in their own environment and feel the pressures that they have to deal with. Face to face discussion is typically more effective than phone calls, because you can see the emotions and reactions of the customer to your questions and the topics being discussed. Thanks to many best practice teaching organizations, many product managers are doing this today, but where we fall short is dissimenating that information to the the rest of the organization.
This creates the organizational silos, that prevent everyone to have a unified perspective of their customer. Even if they dissimenate the information gathered, can product management really gain a holistic view of their customer on their own? A product manager will be asking questions that they believe are important, and the feedback they are given from the customer will be focused on things they believe a product manager would care about. They probably wouldn’t bring up issues that are extremely detailed that only a developer or design engineer would be able to answer, because they aren’t in the meeting. This means that our customer visits are missing the customer perspective regarding issues that would be important to marketing, support, development, operations, and other organizations involved in the innovation value chain. These organizational silos cause everyone in the organization to see only a specific view of the elephant (customer) from a different perspective, and they all miss the entire elephant.
There’s a great book that I recommend to people, when trying to develop an effective customer visits program called “Customer Visits“. One of the key points in this book is that these visits should be made up of a cross-functional team inorder to address and discuss cross-functional issues that are important to the customer. By involving other organizations, these customer visits begin to foster a holistic perception of what who your customer is, what there needs are, and what type of solution would be most useful to them. When the product is being designed or developed, the engineer has an idea of the customer and can accurately imagine the use cases and scenarios that have been described. This complete view of the customer will enable each organization involved in the development of the product to more effectively execute on the plan and help the product manager to realize their product strategy.
The golden question today is, how do we do this in a downturn economy where everyone is cutting costs? Possible suggestions are to involve the entire cross-functional team in developing the discussion guide/topics and then have one person perform the visit. To avoid the silo, you can have a different organization responsible for each visit, so all of them are engaged.
I’d like to know some other ways people have come up with to gather this market research without spending all of their resources to do so.
It seems it is always easy for us as product managers,or even workers within a company to see the point that other employees or groups have a view of the customer based on their own insights, needs, understandings, and perspectives. I think it was good that you took that understanding and applied it to Product Managers too while they perform customer visits.
Having a single or group of product managers create the questions for a customer visit is just as ineffective as having another group make the questions buy themselves. You will not get a holistic view of the customer. Questions poised in a customer visit should come from a cross-functional team.
I have found in the past that you really only need one person on site during a customer visit, but make it very clear that you intend on conferencing others from your company when you discuss things that pertain more to other groups like sales, support, consulting, etc. That way when you ask a question to aid your development teams view of the customer, you can have a development team member on the call, and still get the value of someone observing the reactions and keeping interest.
I think that’s a good option. The people on the phone don’t get the same impact as seeing the customer in their environment, but it’s better than nothing. I think another option is to use market segmentation and choose a smaller customer sample to visit. Since this is being used for market research to gather missing information and indentify market needs, it doesn’t need to be a large sample. Once the needs are identified you can always validate them through a survey to a larger sample set. I would target the arenas or segments that are most attractive to your organization and that you’re lacking the most information from. This way you’d get the most out of your customer visits program.
If you start with statistical aggregates, you might get a good view of one customer, but then the insights get washed away in the averages. Likewise, if you have a team collecting their insights and then roll those insights up, you will end up with some aggregate. Given the negotiation skills of team members vary, the critical insight might not even be mentioned, particularly if the customer is one of those 2% negotiators. Your 2% negotiator might get them. The rest of the team won’t.
I rode an elevator going to lunch one day. The sales rep ask me, “Going to Lunch?” “Yes.” “By yourself?” “Yes.” “I don’t get you guys.”
If you want to use a cross-functional team, read “Dialogue, the Art of Thinking Together.” A lot of things we were taught about empathy and such turn out to be power plays even when they look soft.
Even win-win negotiations can be coercive. You can construct a deal that they can’t refuse. That doesn’t mean that they will like it. Like-like beats a win-win.
I think a key tactic is to ask the user if they manipulate your data in Excel and Access. Then, ask them to demo that to you. Those tools are a sure sign of a lack of fitness between the user and the work the user uses your application for. Those tools also uncover implicit costs that the economic buyer is bearing. They don’t show up in the accounting system.
These are good points. I think we may be misunderstanding each other. When I say Holistic, I don’t mean Average. The question is how fine does the market segmentation have to be before accuracy is within your tolerance. I think you’re right, and that this is one of the problems with only dealing in personas. You and other folks who eat by themselves may play the role of the customer’s “tusk”. Group feeders may play the role of the customer’s “legs”. Those fasting may play the role of the elephant’s body. (how ironic) And it’s true that this segmentation might not produce a fine enough picture; accuracy might not be 100%. But it’s better than saying that the whole elephant or all of your customer’s forgo lunch, just because the body does.
The science of market segmentation is extremely important for the product manager. Not enough segments, and false impressions of the customer start to emerge. Too many of the activities of product management become sluggish, and may even grind to a halt. The Product Management View is hosting a webinar this Wednesday 12noon ET on Strategic Market Segmentation. Linda P. Morton will be presenting a process for practical segmentation. You can go to this link for overview and registration. Go here to access a report which sets the stage for the webinar.