Market Visit- Building for the Customer
Sharing my experience and thoughts around market visits and building for the customer.
I haven’t written in a while, but this is another interesting article to close the year, at least on a different domain, not the usual technical articles I write.
This week, I joined two of my team members on a market visit, where I learned and unlearnt a lot about our customers.
In this article, I will be sharing the approach we took, whether it was effective or not, and the lessons we learned,
Mark visit/ user research,
What is the most effective way of doing a market visit? Is it one that could give you qualitative and quantitive insights?
In this case, I would be biased and lean toward the approach that would yield qualitative data over one that would give quantitative data.
Before going on any market visit, we set goals or objectives. This is either to know how one of our products is doing or to experience the customer pain points within specific journeys in the product. We would formulate a few questions in the area of interest, that we would ask the customers, but here is an interesting approach that I take, I like setting the questions not to ask the customers but to help me know the area of focus and for creating the desired context to getting correct responses.
During the actual market visit, I prefer staying passive and almost entirely would not ask any direct questions. Through observation, you get most of your answers, if not all. On a few occasions, I would pose a question to the customer to invoke them to give more details in the areas of interest, this would help me to blend in…
This is where I would drop the formality and side with them. You want the customer to accept you!
Customer tends to change their behavior if they are being observed or if they sense formality. You have to blend in for them to freely share their thoughts.
Different customers tell different stories about the same product. This is the part I like most, how they narrate their problems and what they do to solve them. Pay attention, to the customer’s problem and their WORK-AROUND SOLUTION. For all the problems that customers experience they already have a solution or a way of dealing with it.
Some of the problems they face are not linked in any way to your product, but in a way it influences how they would interact with it, which becomes your problem. Some of these problems could be solved easily, while others are behavioral and might not be easy to change. The problems and the solutions they have helps form a recipe for the success of your product.
How do you build for the customer?
How do you build in a language that the customer understands?
The ideal case and what the customer wants would be, the product should do, what the customer wants, and when the customer wants out of the box.
You have to build a solution around the customer’s problem and current solution, a solution that is inclusive of customer behavior.
You have to join them. It is unlikely that they will learn or adopt your way.
It calls for understanding the target market demographics, which is paramount in building user-centric products.
If you have to explain a joke, it is probably not good.
It is the same with products. If you have to train or seek customer behavior change, the product is surmised as non-user centric.
Takeaway
Learning and experiencing how the customer behaves, the problems they face, and their solutions are paramount. Build or improve your product around these areas,
Build for the customer sums it all! 😃
