Connect With Visionary Customers Face To Face, Hand To Hand

By Christian Dahlen & Oana Olteanu

There are two type of customer roles involved on the way to product/market fit: Executive sponsors - the buyers and decision makers -  meet at least twice a year. These executive sponsors provide validation of the use case and are future references to gain credibility in the market. A word of caution: As opposed to the users, they have much less patience for multiple product iterations.

The users act as sounding boards and listen to a product proposal such that the product team can explore and rehearse the proposition more fully to align the economic incentives of all the group members. This user sounding board function should not be confused with a council for market development or with industry advisory boards - those come at different stages of the development process.

The product team has one-on-one interactions with the users. It is fairly straightforward to define the minimum set of requirements, and hence iteration cycles can be rapid, using one hour feedback sessions every 2-4 weeks. Each iteration begins with the customer selecting which stories the team will implement during the iteration, and ends with the team producing something for the customer to react to. In these rapid iteration cycles, the team moves from storyboards to a prototype of the proposed user experience with minimal functionality in the least amount of time. With today’s tools, the prototype is quick and inexpensive to build. As long as the user experience is plausible, the backend processing and data can be simulated. A word of warning: Users tend to provide positive feedback during all stages, until they actually have to use the product.

These one-on-one relationships help establish clear accountability on both sides. Initial on-site workshops with select customers are helpful in building rapport, but remote video conferencing interactions are perfectly suited for the monthly follow-up. The value from these interactive user interviews is far higher than from any type of survey or from indirect feedback.

These visionary customers are part of the team and deserve to be rewarded, feted and nurtured: Invite them to company customer events, award them with certificates for their part in the effort, and leverage them in promoting the new product.

Many thanks to Allen Bannon and Ryan Nichols for providing input and feedback.

Photo credits: gettyimages.com

It Takes 10 Visionary Customers To Play The Game

By Christian Dahlen & Oana Olteanu

A product owner needs to work closely with visionaries to develop a product that will meet the need of thousands of customers and millions of users. In almost all cases, working with a single customer will result in a product which does not scale to other customers, with one possible exception: The first customer is a standard setting lighthouse customer in its industry segment; the ‘job to be done’ has already been widely adopted by others.

It is always difficult to recruit multiple charter users and customers without much more than a storyboard. If it is impossible, it is very likely that the product owner is chasing a problem that is not urgent or important. For teams in an accelerator program, finding enough customers within the prescribed three month period until the demo day can be major issue. For product teams in large enterprises, the pressure of a marketing driven release schedule often cuts short the time spent on customer development in favor of frantic engineering activity.

There is agreement that about ten customers in the target market segment is a good number to get to product/market fit. To get to ten actual customers, the team will need to talk to hundreds of people. Only a few dozen will be in the eventual target group, and less than 25 will have the appetite to move forward. Those ten customers will lead to about five reference customers that publicly state their use and satisfaction with the product.

Read next: How to focus on business outcomes and not features.

Special thanks to Allen Bannon, Ryan Nichols, and Riley Scott for their insights.

Photo credits: wallpaper-kid.com.com

How to Get To The Only Thing That Matters

By Christian Dahlen & Oana Olteanu

The only thing that matters for a new startup is to achieve product/market fit. Product/market fit has been achieved when the minimum viable product (MVP) has beta quality, is used in a similar way by ten customers, and the customer acquisition process is repeatable and scalable. For startups, building an MVP first has become commonly accepted practice. Increasingly, the methodology is finding its way into large companies where it can be equally applied to new products and to new versions of existing products.

It is the product owner’s job to pick a problem to solve, figure out how to solve it, and to understand how much the solution is worth to potential customers. The way to go about it is to create a product which sells to many customers and is delivered with the minimum amount of resources - the MVP. Ben Horowitz states that ‘Good product managers crisply define the target, the “what” - as opposed to the how - and manage the delivery of the “what” ‘. As soon as enough software is built to address that crisply defined ‘what’, release. As the old adage goes ‘if you are not embarrassed by your first release, you have waited too long.’

Product owners have been advised to listen to the ‘voice of the customer’ to build the MVP, and all product and customer development will magically take care of itself. In reality, the implied single voice of the customer often is a cacophony from many stakeholders, and distilling an MVP is not as much of a no brainer as it would appear at first. Building an MVP as opposed to just a minimal product is a continuing struggle, and getting to product/market fit often requires the product owner to make multiple iterations over several quarters:

• Should my first customers be visionaries or tech enthusiasts?
• How many customers do I need to talk to?
• What type of feedback should I prioritize?
• Do I need to talk to both the users and the buyers?
• How can I efficiently interact with my early customers?

The road map is clear: a product owner and her team need to push beyond just one customer and remain steadfast in their discovery of a viable product - the ‘what’.

First up: How to pick the right customers.

Many thanks to Allen Bannon, Manny Cortez, Chris Hallenbeck, Ryan Nichols, Karl Christian Roediger, and Riley Scott for providing input and feedback to this series of blog posts.

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