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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Dan Olsen
Started reading
January 1, 2018
The “what” describes the benefits that the product should give the customer—what the product will accomplish for the user or allow the user to accomplish.
The “how” is the design of the product and the specific technology used to implement the product.
The best way to mitigate the risk of an “inside-out” mindset is to ensure your team is talking with customers.
it started with: What incredible benefits can we give to the customer?
If you are targeting businesses, you'll use firmographics instead; these are to organizations what demographics are to people, and include traits such as company size and industry.
Psychographic attributes are more useful than demographics for many products.
behavioral attributes to describe your target customer: whether or not someone takes a particular action or how frequently they do.
Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore's classic book on how to market high-tech products.
Good personas convey the relevant demographic, psychographic, behavioral, and needs-based attributes of your target customer.
If you have customers, you can use interviews and surveys.
Talking to customers in one-on-one interviews is the best way to build this knowledge.
“The average person in my community has 2.3 children, but not a single person in my community has exactly 2.3 children.”
if you are launching a new product or trying to expand to a new target market, you won't have existing customers.
You can always use your judgment to make initial hypotheses about your target customer's attributes, and then test those hypotheses by talking to prospective customers who match that profile.
Before you have any designs or product on which to solicit feedback, you will mainly talk with prospective customers to gain a deeper understanding of their needs, usage of current solutions, and pain poin...
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Your goal is to iterate until you feel confident that you have identified a target customer with an underserved customer need that you believe you can address.
Talking with those passionate customers can especially help sharpen your hypotheses about your target market
Customers are generally not skilled at discussing the problem space; they are better at telling you what they like and dislike about a particular solution.
Good interviewers excel at listening closely to what customers say, repeating statements back to ensure understanding, and asking additional probing questions to illuminate the problem space.
A user goal is no different from a customer need.
customer needs is that they are like onions: they have multiple layers, each with a deeper layer just below it.
As with well-written Agile user stories, benefits should be written from the customer's perspective (using “I” and “my”).
each benefit begins with a verb:
many of the benefits speak to increasing something that's desired (tax deductions) or decreasing something that is not desired (audit risk, time required to accomplish a task).
This makes the benefit very clear and often enables you to objectively measure the performance improvement your product is providing.
customer benefits start out as hypotheses.
Once you have an initial set of hypothetical customer benefits you feel good about, it's time to test them with users. The best way to do so is via one-on-one, in-person customer discovery interviews.
What does this statement mean to you? (to check their understanding)
help you to see if the way you're describing the benefit is clear to users.
The reasons why customers find certain benefits valuable are the gold nuggets you want to mine, since those comments help you gain a better understanding of how customers think and what's important to them.
customer needs can have hierarchies.
These hierarchies create dependencies between needs, where the value created by addressing one need is a function of how much another need is being met.
lower-level needs have to be met before higher-level needs matter.
Importance is a problem space concept, separate from any specific solution space implementation.
Differences in the importance of needs influence a customer's decisions and preferences.
the importance axis is more stable.
It's usually best to measure satisfaction using a bipolar scale; since people can be satisfied or dissatisfied, a negative score makes sense.
importance is just a matter of degree—without any negative value—and therefore better measured with a unipolar scale.
it is generally agreed that 5-point scales are best for unipolar and 7-point scales are best for bipolar—which
“doing quant on qual”—quantitative analysis on qualitative data.
Statistical significance is great when you have the sample size to achieve it, but it isn't an all or nothing proposition.
you can make progress with a sample size of zero. How? By using the framework to formulate and clarify your hypotheses.
You could lay out each of your hypotheses on the four-quadrant framework—either digitally or with Post-it notes—and then move them around, revise them, and add new ones as you learn and iterate.
Anthony Ulwick's book What Customers Want.
all too often, product objectives or requirements are far too “fuzzy”—too high-level or vague.
“For most jobs, even those that may seem somewhat trivial, there are typically 50 to 150 or more desired outcomes—not just a handful.”
breaks customer needs into three relevant categories that you can use: performance needs, must-have needs, and delighters.
Must-have needs don't create satisfaction by being met. Instead, the need not being met causes customer dissatisfaction.
You have to meet basic needs before you can get credit for performance features. And your product must be competitive on performance features before delighters matter.
Think about the customer benefits that are relevant in your product category and classify them into the three categories of must-haves, performance benefits, and delighters.
