If you want breakthrough products, don’t start by asking customers about your product ideas
So you have some great product ideas that you want to get some customer feedback on. You want to go out and talk to your target customers to make sure your product ideas are going to resonate with them and to ensure that these customers will want to buy your new product when you take it to market.
Sounds like a good approach – you’re engaging with customers in the product development process, so you’re certainly being customer-centric.
Well, if you’re trying to develop something new and different that is likely to drive strong customer preference, then the answer is probably no. To explain why, let’s consider a simple analogy.
Why customer feedback on product ideas gives you the wrong answers
When people were getting around in horse and carts, there were lots of iterations being developed that would make the horse and cart better. People came up with better wheels, better suspension, better feed for the horse and even better breeds of horse. All of these changes would have made incremental improvements to the horse and cart.
When these suppliers went and asked customers what they thought about their new products, the customers would no doubt have given them a big thumbs up – they were going to get a better horse and cart, so why wouldn’t they? The only frame of reference the customers had was the horse and cart, so any improvements to it would have elicited a positive response. But the incremental value that the improvements were making may not have been enough for horse and cart owners to go and buy the new and improved version – particularly if it was from a new supplier they weren’t familiar with.
The real problem that customers wanted solving was to get around without being dependent on an animal that needed food and frequent rest. Some innovative people focused on solving that problem, and then along came the motorised cart – which quickly evolved into the motorcar.
What this tells us about customer-centric product development
This analogy points to two things:
- If you want to identify opportunities for creating significant new value for customers, don’t go to them with an incremental product and ask for feedback. They’ll confirm that the product is better than what they already have – but it may not be good enough for them to switch to your version, and sales may well be disappointing.
- If you really want to run a customer-centric product development process, you should start with the customer instead of a product idea. If you start with customers and do genuinely exploratory research, you’ll uncover insights into what customers are struggling to get done. It is these insights that create opportunities for delivering new value – helping customers solve their biggest problems rather than confirming your existing assumptions. It is these insights that provide the context for coming up with new product ideas that can then be tested and refined using Lean Startup methodologies.
What genuinely exploratory customer research looks like
The distinction between confirmatory and exploratory research is more significant than it might appear.
Confirmatory research – showing customers a prototype and asking whether they like it – produces positive responses almost regardless of whether the product will actually drive switching behaviour. People are polite, they respond to what’s in front of them, and they lack a frame of reference for what they don’t yet know exists.
Exploratory research starts further back. It asks customers to reconstruct real decisions they have made – what prompted them to look for a solution, what alternatives they considered, what almost stopped them switching, what they wished had been different. Jobs to Be Done research, developed by Clayton Christensen and refined by practitioners including Bob Moesta, is built precisely for this kind of inquiry. It surfaces the causal drivers of customer choice rather than the surface preferences that confirmatory research tends to produce.
This is also the foundation of our Causal CX approach – starting with an understanding of what customers are actually trying to accomplish, and what is causing them to choose or switch, before a single product decision is made. The organisations that get this right do not just build better products. They build products that give customers a genuine reason to move.
How to tell whether your product development process is truly customer-centric
If your process starts with customers and is uncovering genuine opportunities for creating new value along the dimensions that matter to them, you have a truly customer-centric process that should serve you well.
If, on the other hand, your process is really just using customers to confirm your own beliefs in the value of your product ideas, it may be time to give it a good shake – and start engaging with customers earlier, and asking them different questions.
The test is straightforward: is your research producing insights that surprise you? If every customer conversation confirms what you already believed, the research is probably aimed at the wrong question.
Elemental Concept and Purple Shirt help organisations across the UK, Australia and New Zealand build customer-centric products, starting with exploratory research that uncovers the real drivers of customer choice.
Find out more about our innovation and strategy work, Jobs to Be Done, or our Experience Design work.
