Empathizing with your customers - The role it plays in product strategy
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The document discusses the importance of empathizing with customers in developing effective product strategies, emphasizing the need to ask the right questions to understand customer needs and pain points. It highlights that many strategies fail due to internal biases rather than being customer-centric and stresses the significance of ongoing dialogue and customer feedback. Furthermore, it notes that product leaders must also consider internal stakeholders and connect various functions to deliver value.
Empathizing with your customers - The role it plays in product strategy
- 1. Empathizing with Your Customers The Role it Plays in Product Strategy
- 3. PRINCIPLE ONE: Whether you are in Marketing or Product, what you do needs to center on the customer.
- 4. Foundation: Asking the Right Questions October 2017 Empathizing with Your Customers with Jim Gregoire | Flywheel Associates 4 • Questions are critical for any good product leader to understand and subsequently address: 1. Why would somebody use this product? 2. What is the circumstance under which they're trying to make a decision? 3. How did they become aware that they have a problem that they need to solve? 4. Where do they look for solutions? 5. How they do they assess whether or not a solution is good for them? • This is foundational to your product strategy.
- 5. Why is Product Strategy Important? • An effective product strategy addresses the needs and pain your target audience is experiencing. • Product strategy is critical to get the company wide buy-in you need to develop the product. • The strategy serves as a communications device to help convince stakeholders to provide the resources you need to deliver against your customer’s needs. 5October 2017 Empathizing with Your Customers with Jim Gregoire | Flywheel Associates
- 6. What People are Getting Wrong • The downfall of many product strategies is that they aren’t customer-centric. • Rather they reflect an internal bias – it’s what the stakeholders believe their customers needs and challenges are. • It’s important to take the time to get into the head of your target customer. • When organizations assume they already know what has to be done, they can ultimately lose sight of why these product experiences are being created in the first place. 6October 2017 Empathizing with Your Customers with Jim Gregoire | Flywheel Associates
- 8. The Key to Product Strategy: Empathy October 2017 Empathizing with Your Customers with Jim Gregoire | Flywheel Associates 8 • As a product leader, your job is understanding and empathizing with your customer. • If you can’t, you will struggle with translating their needs into the right product strategy and find it more difficult to justify it. • And at the end of the day, you need to ensure you create value for your customer.
- 10. Understanding Your Customers’ Pain Points • Empathizing with your customer means getting to the epicenter of what the pain is and making sure that you fully understand it yourself. • It’s about having an appreciation for their view of the world and seeking out experiences that would serve as good reference points for context. 10October 2017 Empathizing with Your Customers with Jim Gregoire | Flywheel Associates
- 11. Creating Value Through Data & Learning • Your job as a product person is to build habitual behavior through the products/services you offer that inherently delivers value for your target audience. • This requires having ongoing dialogue while continuously monitoring and measuring how your product is performing against their needs and expectations. • Never take your eyes off customer feedback. It’s critical. • With the market changing regularly, you run the risk of your assumptions getting stale. To be competitive, you have to be in touch with your audience. 11October 2017 Empathizing with Your Customers with Jim Gregoire | Flywheel Associates
- 13. Don’t Forget Internal Stakeholders • Internal stakeholders are your customers, too. The nature of your role as a product leader requires you to know cross-functional areas in order to ultimately deliver value. • You have to think and act like a partner, which enables you to connect the dots across all functions and assist/lead your stakeholders. 13October 2017 Empathizing with Your Customers with Jim Gregoire | Flywheel Associates
- 14. Tune in to STRATEGIC MOMENTUM PODCAST to hear from more guests like Jim! About Jim Gregoire Jim is the Chief Product Officer at Openbay, an award-winning online marketplace for auto repair and provider of SaaS-based offerings for the auto care industry. Before transitioning to product development leadership roles, Jim spent a good portion of his career in marketing, where he began his focus on identifying and understanding the target audience. Resources: ● Connect with Jim on LinkedIn ● Learn more about Openbay
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