FUNDAMENTALS OF PRODUCT MANAGEMENT: THE PROCESSES

Product discovery planning using ‘Story Mapping’ and ‘Customer Discovery’

To structure a scaffolding around product discovery, depending on the complexity of the problem we are solving, product teams can resort to Story Mapping or Customer Discovery to manage efforts

After scoping a product discovery project to create alignment and mitigate risks, it’s time to execute the discovery journey and the first step is to plan for it.

Very similar to the scoping process, planning can take the form of a small to a large size project depending on the requirements (or the scope of the project).

· Smaller project scope: Story mapping

· Large project scope: Customer discovery (or customer development)

Story mapping

Story Mapping template: Image by Concept board and found here

The basics

Story mapping can be used during the scoping (or framing), planning, ideation, and prototyping stages of product discovery and is a simple and amazing visual communication tool.

Defining ‘Design Thinking’ — in theory and action

Story maps are two-dimensional visual maps in which important user activities are arranged across the horizontal axis in a variety of orders such as by time, making it simple and easy to understand by any stakeholder and quick to brainstorm and ideate with. Along the vertical axis, the level of detail increases, and sets of user tasks are inserted, with stories for each task. It’s often the norm to lay higher-priority tasks at the top of the story map.

The benefits

There are several benefits to story mapping:

• It’s quick and easy to make and several team members can help build it
• It’s visually holistic and helps identify objectives and priorities quickly
• Each story gives context to the whole product or the bigger picture
• The team can easily identify bottlenecks and how the product will grow
• It helps understand how to move forward with prototypes
• It can quickly get updated as the team gathers feedback from customers and the team
• Can help quickly build the backlog for development

Detailed story maps and high-fidelity prototypes are quick go-to tools for smaller-scope product discovery projects such as testing new feature releases. However, with larger projects of scope, story mapping will fall short and fundamental analysis of customers’ needs through “Customer Discovery” will be needed.

Photo by Mark Williams on Unsplash

Customer discovery

Customer Development: a product manager’s top priority

The most important objective of the product team is to create and deliver products that can overcome five key risks and sustainably create business-worthy value. Therefore, everything in the organization will eventually depend on the product. For example:

• Marketing needs a great product to reduce customer acquisition costs
• Sales need great products to reduce sales cycles and better negotiate prices, and
• Customer service needs products that minimize customer requests.

Again, everything in the organization will eventually depend on the product…

‘Customer Discovery’ is for large projects that require substantial efforts such as a redesign, new products or business launches, or taking a business to a new market or geography. In other words, ‘Customer Discovery’ efforts are not economic for smaller projects such as that of a few feature launches.

The fundamental assumption with ‘Customer Discovery’ is that with every significant new product, customers want to see that others similar to themselves are already successfully using the product and are loyal to it, as a social point of reference, influence, and/or persuasion. The larger that loyal base (i.e., Reference Customers), the more that product will scale, break-even, and generate profits.

The power of the loyal customers

A loyal customer is defined as:

• Not a friend or relative (i.e., low emotional involvement with the product)
• Is using a product not on a trial basis or prototype format
• Is paying for the service, and
• Is willing to promote the product and make referrals for free

Loyal customers are the single most important asset to an organization as

• They are free sales and marketing channels
• Reduce time to find product-market-fit, and
• Dependence on their views will radically shift the business toward a customer-centric organization

Finding and discovering a loyal base of customers (i.e. customer discovery) is the essence of product discovery and delivery. Consequentially, customer discovery is the best leading indicator of product success, despite being an exhaustive and resource-intensive effort.

Focus is key to Customer Discovery

It’s important to maintain focus on specific target customers and to deep dive into their needs and desires thoroughly. Targeting more than one market segment will rarely reveal the necessary value-creating insights that need to be reflected in the product vision and strategy for all team efforts to align with.

When the product has answered the desires of a vertical, then the team can move to other segments to scale. Therefore, choosing the initial target market or niche will be key to future growth and business model sustainability.

The importance of choosing the ‘Reference Customers’

To build products for loyalty, it’s important to pick a sample of reference customers and to do so, you should consider the following points:

• You need to find customers that truly feel the pain and are desperate for a solution as there are currently few alternatives out there. If they could find a solution that worked for them elsewhere, they would have done so already
• If you are having trouble recruiting the minimum number of customers you need, then it means that the problem you are solving does not truly exist (i.e., demand validation)
• It’s important to screen out technologists and innovators at the initial stage and to find customers who would fall under the category of early adopters. Technologists and innovators will create a social bubble or hype around the product which you will be aiming to build for the masses which mostly leads to a lack of scale
• The first batch of customers that you choose need to be willing to work closely with you at no cost providing thoughts, feedback, working with the prototypes, etc.

This work mode is a mutually beneficial model as the customers get a product that will truly serve their needs and the product team gets free access to insights and customers willing to pay for a product, minimizing their business risks.

Although the ‘Reference Customers’ need to be made aware that the product team will eventually deliver a general product that will scale for many customers other than the small few involved in the initial study.

Reference customers and the various business cases

How you go about choosing ‘Reference Customers' and the number that you choose, can vary depending on the nature of your business and its customer archetypes. This variation will fall under one of the following four situations:

• Business-to-Business: it’s a rule of thumb to choose 6–8 customers from the specific vertical/segment (e.g., pharmaceuticals, agriculture, etc.) you are focused on as your reference customers. In these cases, you may need the product marketing or sales team involved during the tenure of your relationship with the reference customers
• API platforms: in these cases, the product is built for developers and engineers (of other businesses, therefore, it is a pseudo-B2B environment) and 6–8 customers from various verticals will be needed to study dependencies and communication technologies to build a scalable API solution
• Internal use: this can entail for example a dashboard for a functional unit of the organization. To build a solution that will ratify most needs and minimize issues after launch, 6–8 loyal and influential employees and thought leaders should suffice (i.e., B2B product build)
• Business-to-Consumers: with consumer products, the scale of reference customers needs to be larger, and depending on the complexity of the problem you are solving, 10–50 initial reference customers need to be collaborated with during product discovery. Furthermore, the qualitative findings of their pains and desires and your proposed solutions need to be quantitatively tested across a larger number of customers from the same segment that is representative of the target market (i.e., generally 400–500 with a confidence interval of 95%+). Otherwise finding product-market-fit will be quite unlikely

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