Forbes quoted Steve Jobs as saying “I’m as proud of what we don’t do as I am of what we do.” This is a really enlightened perspective – and a way to enforce focus from the top down. Before you can drive a “this goal is more important than that goal” focus, you have to make sure you’re actually focusing on the goals.
The Customer Does NOT Know Best
The top review of a mobile phone app caught my attention over the weekend. I highlighted a section which really provided clarity for me about the difference between building what the customer asks for, and what the customer actually needs.
The app provides food-item nutritional information. As you might imagine, navigating the tables of information on a smaller touch-screen device (phone or tablet) could be tedious or tricky. Definitely a place where the user’s experience could be improved. This user, who likes the app, wrote a request to be able to sort the tables by column – a “faster horse” for the smart phone era.
This reviewer also added some prose to justify the request for sorting – the desire to avoid foods which are bad for him.
The extra information actually allows us to get closer to the “why” – a desire to eat healthy foods – and not fixate on the “what” – the ability to sort the information. I’ve worked with many people who would do something like the following:
- Add a story / feature request to the backlog / spreadsheet, to enable users to sort the information in the tables.
- Get feedback from other users – “would you like to be able to sort?”
- Prioritize and schedule the feature to be built.
This can easily happen because the product manager focused on the “what” of sorting. It is an easy mistake to make. The customer asked for sorting, so the customer wants (needs) sorting. When I asked other customers if they wanted to be able to sort, they all said “sure.” This is being customer-driven, and outside-in, right? Wrong.
Being Market Drive Requires Synthesis
If you’re a regular reader here, you’ve already heard 100 times the importance of asking “Why?” A different question approach, based on Clayton Christensen’s work in The Innovator’s Solution and the Jobs to be Done approach, will simultaneously ask “why?” and initiate the synthesis process.
“What are you trying to do, when you want to sort?”
There may be a much better way to avoid unhealthy foods than giving users the ability to sort.
You shouldn’t stop here, either.
What are you really trying to accomplish, which is driving you to avoid unhealthy foods?
Perhaps the user has a medical condition which restricts their dietary choices, if the goal is to feel better (in order to spend higher quality time with their family).
Conclusion
If you’re trying to build a nutrition-information app with the goal of helping someone feel better, you probably wouldn’t put “sort by sodium level” at the top of your backlog. Instead you might build an app which asks them how they feel every day, correlates that with what they ate recently, and then warns them when they are about to make historically bad choices (or rewards them for repeated good behavior).
Being market driven is about synthesizing what customers tell you. Your area of expertise is to understand what is needed, based on what is asked for. The customer’s area of expertise is not in root-cause analysis, abstraction, interface design, and software development – they won’t make directly-useful requests.
| Reference: | Why Not What – An Example from our JCG partner Scott Sehlhorst at the Tyner Blain’s blog blog. |
