Customer Research
Conducting Customer Research is invaluable when attempting to build a product or provide a service that excites and delights customers and makes an impact in the market.
Below are some techniques and approaches to help understand who the customers are and what their expectations, pain points and motivations are to help refine the Product Backlog and position the Sprint Goals to do something amazing.
Types of Users
Making a differentiation between customers, end users and stakeholders can help to understand each of these groups’ needs and address them specifically in the Product Backlog.
Customers
Customers are paying users of the product or service and are highly mobile, have high expectations and likely to want to use the product or service to achieve a particular goal or end outcome. They are quick to migrate to competitor offerings if those expectations are not sufficiently met and do not offer their loyalty easily.
The Product Owner’s role here is to understand who the customers are and derive exciting and valuable deliverables to satisfy existing customers and attract new ones.
End Users
End users are usually internal customers who need to use the service or product to reach an organisational outcome and satisfy a task. They will tend to look at the product or service as an enabler. If the product or service is not matching their immediate needs, then they are quite likely to find alternatives, provide direct feedback in the form of criticism or request support and time from the Developers to assist them.
Often with little options to go outside of the organisation, end users can often be less than sympathetic with the complexities of product delivery especially if there is a history of lethargic delivery and substandard deliverables.
The Product Owner’s role here is to listen to their pain points and provide a good strategy that assists them with their objectives, and ultimately removes the pain from the end users’ daily work.
Stakeholders
Stakeholders are not necessarily end users of the product or service but will have significant influence over the acceptance of the product or service. Success of the product or service may well be aligned to the personal goals and objectives of the stakeholders, and so they often want to be informed and involved in the development of the product in order to satisfy those objectives.
External influences such as regulatory requirements and compliance for example may also drive their needs and motivations. As a result, they will need to be able to provide feedback or at least be involved with the high level decision making to ensure that a good outcome is reached.
The Product Owner’s role here is to listen and understand the external influences and motivations behind the stakeholders’ needs and provide a product or service and accommodates them.
See Also
- How Might We... Note Taking
- Lightening Talks
- Personas
- Empathy Mapping
- User Interviews
- User Journey Mapping
- Empathy Exercises & Scenarios
- Success Metrics
- Design Sprint
References
- Design Sprint Kit, accessed December 2018