I asked for a show of hands: "How many of you have built something that customers didn't use?" The entire room raised their hands. Some gave nervous giggles. One leader mentioned a feature release that others in the room also knew about.
In technology companies, it isn't uncommon for an executive or a product manager to ask an engineer to build a product or feature. If it is something that makes sense or is consistent with their understanding of the product, engineers may proceed towards building it. This can occasionally result in a waste of their time because customers don't use it.
In a customer-focused company, everyone is focused on understanding the customer part of the equation, as well as the business and technological issues. This includes engineers.
Last week, I was working with a group of engineers at a tech company in San Francisco to understand why it is important to focus on customers. Over the course of the conversation, it became clear to me that having a set of filtering questions could be a useful tool for the group. I scribbled these 5 questions down, and I thought I'd share them more broadly.
Let's go through each one and understand why it is an important question to ask. when someone requests that they build something.
1. Who is the customer?
This question helps you understand who the solution is for, and what characteristics they have that are worth noting when building a solution. In a customer-focused company, for any given product or feature, there is a clear understanding of who the customer is, based on in-person research with the customers and a deep understanding of what they are trying to do, why, the context and the challenges they face. As an engineer, if you don't know this customer yourself, it is important to ask about the customer and what the company knows about them, including their level of comfort with technology, level of experience and expertise, and other things that may impact what you will build. If the person requesting the feature or product isn't able to answer this question, you should wait to build until this is clarified.
2. What is the problem?
This question is about what the feature or product is intended to address. The problem should be a customer problem, and ideally the requestor is able to provide the information from the customer's perspective. It is important to ask this question because as an engineer, you may know of other ways to address the problem. You also should know the problem so you do not build a solution that doesn't really solve for the problem. A good tool to use, if they do not have a clear articulation of the problem, is the Customer Problem Statement. This focuses the problem on the barrier to accomplishing what the customer is trying to, or the benefit that the customer is trying to attain.
3. How does this problem make the customer feel?
This question helps you understand if this is an important problem for the customer and the impact it will have when you build something that will alleviate the problem. If the person requesting you to build something doesn't know how this problem makes the customer feel, you might want to be wary of whether they actually have spoken to customers about the problem. It is important to dig below the surface with problems to ensure that the root cause is addressed, and if the requester hasn't spent time with the customer observing and talking about the problem, perhaps you should. If the customer doesn't feel pain associated with the problem, that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be addressed, but it might mean that the customer may not be bothered enough by it that they would choose to use the solution you build.
4. Will this solution solve the problem AND make the customer feel better?
If the person requesting the solution can answer the first three questions, then this question falls naturally out and helps to clarify whether the solution will actually make things better. If the answer is yes, go on to question 5. If the answer is no or I'm not sure, then you shouldn't jump immediately into building. Instead, you'll want to run some lean experiments to see if it will solve the problem, and do some rapid prototyping with customers to get their emotional reaction to the solution. By testing it out, you will be able to have confidence that what you are going to build will be something that addresses the needs of the customer.
5. What proof do you have (for #4)?
In the world of business, making decisions based on opinion alone is dangerous. So, you want to have some evidence from actual customer data, experiments and prototyping to give yourself some confidence in the decision. In this case, if the person who asks for a feature, tells you that it will solve a specific painful problem for customers, then requesting proof will result in one of two outcomes: (a) the person will have done research and has tested the assumption that this solution will solve for the customer and they can easily answer this question - which should give you confidence to continue working towards building the solution. or (b) the person will not have evidence - which should make you wary and suggests that you should run lean experiments and rapid prototyping with customers to make sure that this is the right approach. You might also want to explore alternative approaches that may solve for the customer's problem and pain.
The ultimate benefit of engineers asking these questions is that they can be confident that the solutions they build actually address something important for customers, so customers are more likely to actually use the solution.
In a culture where these questions are regularly asked, very few hands would raise up in response to the show of hands, and very little effort will be wasted on building things that customers don't care about.
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