{"componentChunkName":"component---src-layouts-blog-post-js","path":"/insights/2019/04/15/customer-experience-first-building-products-that-matter","webpackCompilationHash":"e9b84744a928659eb31b","result":{"data":{"markdownRemark":{"html":"<h2>A Product Manager’s guide to adopt the Customer Experience mindset.</h2>\n<p><img src=\"https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*qwMIiU7y4ihJBVnApTlqFw.jpeg\" alt=\"Value Proposition\"></p>\n<p>The main job of a Product Manager is to find and build the best solutions to her customer’s problems. As trivial as it sounds, we keep witnessing the rise and failure of thousands of products. That leads us to a simple yet powerful question: how does a Product Manager ‘manages’ to build a product that Customers really wants?</p>\n<h2>Everything starts with the customer experience</h2>\n<blockquote>\n<p>You have to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology — Steve Jobs</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>In the past couple of years we’ve seen a rising trend in our industry: In terms of products and services, everything starts with the Customer Experience. Nowadays, people don’t just buy a product or service, they buy an experience, something that makes them feel great or successful.</p>\n<h2>Feel the pain and learn from it</h2>\n<p>As a Product Manager, the first step you have to do is to understand the problem you want to solve. Once you decided what problem you want to solve, you’ll have to learn from it. One way to do it, is by interviewing your customers, asking them how they currently work around it, and learn the ways they interact with the problem; but don’t stop there; if possible, experience the problem yourself, think about it as if you were an undercover cop, you have to personally live the problem. That way, you’ll start thinking on possible solutions. And no, I am not talking about technology here, before you start thinking about whether using Node, Rails or PHP, you need to reimagine the set of processes that will let the user be successful on her desired outcome (goals).</p>\n<p>Let me teach by an example: When I built Cloudadmin, I spent many weeks at warehouses and retail stores, doing and learning how they used to work and identifying the pain-points and bottlenecks of doing so. That way, I managed to find out ways to improve the processes by reducing the steps required to perform a given task. I call this method: process refactoring.</p>\n<h2>MVP: Half product not half-ass product</h2>\n<p><img src=\"https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*fvLwl7V1SY7xvBqmhsPakw.png\" alt=\"MVP\"></p>\n<p>The MVP is widely misunderstood, it doesn’t mean you’ll create a crappy product that do a mediocre job, it means, though, you’ll create a small portion of the product that actually works and solves a couple of issues, specially core issues, the ones that’ll let your customer to get interested in your solution (and hopefully pay for it).</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*pQKH-IAkvc1nfEius6WW6g.jpeg\" alt=\"Juvasoft&#x27;s Product Development Lifecycle\"></p>\n<p>Let me put it this way: When you find a problem you decide to solve, you have to have the whole vision in mind (What do you want your product to be in 5 years?). However, the smart move to do, is to split the vision in different phases (The Product Roadmap) and, for the first phase (The MVP), you have to solve the core problem, the one that’ll let you get some customers (Traction), learn from them (Iterate) and, eventually, build your way up on top of that (Scale).</p>","frontmatter":{"title":"Customer Experience First, building products that matter","date":"April 15, 2019","author":"Alfredo Juarez","featured":true,"avatar":"https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/fit/c/100/100/1*OQgaBPUritgTf9TvdopTtQ.jpeg","category":["Product","Startups"],"tags":["Product Design","User Research","Market Development","Business Development","Product Management"],"image":"https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2600/1*i7D0wbUBXN1CK_4nfDLn3Q.jpeg"}}},"pageContext":{"isCreatedByStatefulCreatePages":false,"slug":"/insights/2019/04/15/customer-experience-first-building-products-that-matter","prev":{"node":{"fields":{"slug":"/insights/2019/05/15/go-to-market-channel-development"},"frontmatter":{"title":"Go-to-market – Channel Development","date":"2019-05-15T00:00:00.000Z","author":"Alfredo Juarez","avatar":"https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/fit/c/100/100/1*OQgaBPUritgTf9TvdopTtQ.jpeg","category":["Product","Startups"],"featured":true,"image":"https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2600/1*kN6Yp-Tmah-Z_7rb0IWr4Q.png"},"html":"<h2>How to get other people to sell your product.</h2>\n<blockquote>\n<p>“if you think that just because they’ll make money by selling your product is enough, you’re deemed to fail.”</p>\n</blockquote>\n<p>When we were creating the go-to-market strategy for Cloudadmin, it made a lot of sense to tap into accounting firms to be our de-facto channel — if it worked for Xero and Intuit, it should work for us, we figured. It turns out that accounting firms didn’t care too much about how their customers’ (our target market) handled their inventory and sales order management. On the other hand, consulting firms were more likely to care about it, I mean, they were actually selling consulting gigs on these kind of stuff.</p>\n<p>Truth is, just as you would do customer development to find out what product you should build, you also should talk to your potential channels to find out if it would make sense for them to be your channel (meaning, what’s the value proposition for them) — on this note, if you think that just because they’ll make money by selling your product is enough, you’re deemed to fail.</p>\n<h2>Designing the Value Proposition</h2>\n<p><img src=\"https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*qwMIiU7y4ihJBVnApTlqFw.jpeg\" alt=\"Value Proposition Design\"></p>\n<p>First of all, start by coming up with a set of hypothesis about what kind of people/companies would be the ideal channels and why they’d be willing to sell your product — as I said before, revenue share isn’t always enough for them to sell your product. It needs to come along with a compelling value proposition.</p>\n<p>The best way to design your value proposition is by talking to them to prove whether you’re right or not, if not, you might find something in their responses that you can change to be right (more on that later).</p>\n<p>Here are a few questions you can ask to prove your hypothesis:</p>\n<ol>\n<li>How does your product complement with their own value proposition?</li>\n<li>What benefits will they perceive if their customers use your product?</li>\n<li>Why will they care to sell your product?</li>\n<li>Will they expand their customer base because of your product?</li>\n<li>How will their business be different/better because they’re selling your product?</li>\n</ol>\n<p>The answers to the these questions will give you a true north on whether that’s the channel you want to pursue, what kind of messaging you can use to get them on board and/or, in some cases, prove your hypothesis wrong — While doing this process, I’ve come up with situations where the product itself represented a threat to the type of companies I was trying to get on board. In other cases, I’ve found out that instead of being Partners, they were actually the end customers. Who knows? That’s why you need to talk to them.</p>\n<p>You do need to get out of the building, first of all, to find out what kind of product you have to build, and then, figuring out what are the best distribution channels you can partner with.</p>\n<p>Happy hustling!</p>"}}}}}