We believe that building the right product is about a balance between fulfilling your business objectives whilst satisfying your user’s needs. As discussed in the previous article, Play Like a Prop Tech, successful Prop Techs are customer-centric. They put the customer at the heart of decision making. They talk regularly to customers and prospects to understand real-world challenges. And by doing this, they realise the value they can bring.

At Sonin, our app development process is centred around generating user data to inform the direction of your build. Our evidence-based approach ensures you have a clear focus of what your customers need from you from the outset. This results in a successful product for your business and users.

In the blog that follows, we reveal why the exercises in our discovery workshops are one of the best ways to be customer-centric and ultimately, allow you to play like a prop tech. Here’s how…

1. Spotlight your customer

The best way to be customer-centric is to start at the beginning and identify who your users are.

A common mistake businesses make is to follow the crowd and build something similar to what their competition have, rather than taking the time to find out who their consumers are and what they need of their product or service.

We know that a successful product is built when both the business and user have an strong need for the product. Identifying your customer, therefore, is the first step towards your user research. It gives you a demographic to speak to so that you can find out what they want and need from your product. Once you start talking to your target customer, you will soon find out if the product you want to build aligns with their desires or not.

By identifying who your customer is from the outset, you can remain focussed on building the right product that will be used and therefore, valued.

2. Know your customer inside and out

Being customer-centric means knowing your customer inside and out. Knowing their preferences, their dislikes and what they look for in a product like yours allows you to have the knowledge to build a product that they find value in.

Our end-to-end User Research process includes one-to-one interviews, focus groups, and drive alongs. Our comprehensive approach provides you with all the information you need to know your customer. It offers insights into your customers’ behaviours, attitudes, and motivations. You can then use this information to validate any assumptions about your product’s market fit and to adjust its direction. It can also validate any feature ideas you want to introduce, too.

From this, you can define the key metrics that will prove the success of your product.

For example, if you wanted to implement an AI-powered chat function into your app, but your user research showed that 85% of users are time poor and find automated bots rarely answer their questions correctly, then you can use this metric to prove that spending the time and money building the chat feature wouldn’t produce much reward.

Therefore, user research allows you to identify your users’ most pressing needs and concerns and incorporate these insights into product development. This ensures that you are building the right product – a product that meets both your own goals and your customers’ needs. The data and insights from the User Research will ultimately inform the user experience, interface and features that end up in your app.

3. Represent your customer

Being customer-centric means putting the customer at the heart of all decision making.

Feature ideation is an exercise which determines what features will be in your app. It involves looking at your users and business biggest pain points and then coming up with features to solve them.

This exercise forces you to utilise the data you have gathered in the user research process to represent your customer’s voice, suggesting feature ideas that would solve your customer’s biggest pain points.

By doing this, you are putting the customers at the centre of product development. By ensuring that your feature suggestions are tied to resolving your customer’s biggest frustrations, you can build a product that offers a good user experience. In turn, this results in a positive reputation for your product, equating to more users utilising your product and coming back for more.

The feature prioritisation exercise is also famously customer-centric. It is bound by the MoSCow methodology and involves categorising each feature into a Must Haves, Should Haves, Could Haves, or Won’t haves section. To do this, you must make data-driven decisions based on your user research.

Before deciding which category a feature goes in to, you need to ask yourself “Will this feature help achieve the user’s biggest frustration of X?” If it’s a non-negotiable yes, then you would decide to categorise that feature as a Must Have. If it’s a maybe, then you would decide to categorised that feature as a Should Have or Could Have, and so on.  

The outcome of this exercise is to produce a product roadmap that prioritises the high value, low effort features so that you and your users receive the most value, fast. This helps you build the right product based in fact and evidence; being customer-centric, just like a prop tech.

Discovery workshops help you be customer-centric!

The exercises in our discovery workshops are one of the best ways to become customer-centric and play like a prop tech because:

  • Defining your users will allow you to spotlight your customer – giving you focus and a reminder that your product will only be successful if it is valuable to the users and business. It also allows you to identify your audience before going out and doing user research.
  • User Research will allow you to get to know your customer completely – what they like, dislike, favour and want from a product like yours. This data-collection exercise allows you to get into the head of your customer and collate all the information you need to build a customer-centric product!
  • Feature Ideation and Prioritisation will allow you to represent your customer during important product decision-making exercises. It’ll give you the opportunity to use the facts you have collated from the User Research to create and defend ideation and prioritisation decisions – really and truly putting the customer at the heart of the process.

Live the experience for yourself!

Now you’ve understood how to build the right product, why not see how it’s done when we bring these exercises to life in our Discovering your Digital Solution webinar sessions?

Our product experts will be walking through our Product Discovery exercises in a live environment, demonstrating the best way to navigate the early stages of app development.

You will learn how to run your own Product Discovery workshop!

We’ll demonstrate how you can:

  • Facilitate a product discovery workshop in your own workplace
  • Get key decision makers on board and engaged
  • Build the right product that’s bespoke to your business and users

Reserve your space at one of the next sessions and make it happen!