Today’s customers have options. Every product and service has multiple providers. If people are unhappy with the experience of one provider, switching to another is quick and easy.
Alongside this, the idea of paying a slightly higher cost for a better experience has become increasingly more acceptable. Social media and word of mouth advertisements have also started to play a larger role in whether a user decides to adopt your product. This has pushed the companies to take a more customer-led growth strategic approach to retain and acquire customers rather than the traditional marketing or sales-led approach.
A customer-led product strategy is when the customer is at the center of every company decision. You aim to provide the best experience to your customers. To do so, you work to understand your customer’s behavior, needs, and pain points.
From your research, you then adapt your product to serve your users. While doing so, strive to build a strong relationship, gain trust, and ultimately create a recurring business growth cycle.
The key to achieving customer-led growth is to establish a customer-centric organization. To help you achieve this, follow these five principles:
Understanding your customers goes beyond knowing who they are demographically. It means understanding their needs, behavior, triggers, pain points, motivation, and preferences.
Creating personas with a backstory is a great way to understand and empathize with your customer; for example, instead of defining your customer as Ana, a woman 33 years old from California, try creating a persona for Ana.
Ana, 33, mother of two kids, working at a marketing agency trying to check on her kids while on the way to a meeting, gives an in-depth understanding of Ana’s situation and creates empathy for her urgency and state of mind while using your product. It’s the same customer, but the approach will be widely different if the team understands Ana and her situation better.
Collecting as much data as possible on how your customer behaves and uses your product leads to more informed product decisions. Surveys, interviews, user testing, and analytical tools are all essential to gather data.
Showcasing the importance of collecting data and creating insights empowers the team to spend extra time and resources implementing these processes into product development. It might take a little longer to develop and deliver, but data will help ensure that you’re developing a product that’s desirable, feasible, and viable.
After a feature is developed and released, your work isn’t over. Instead, the product team should analyze the feature’s performance, gather user feedback, and make necessary improvements accordingly. This way, the team can ensure that the feature meets the user’s needs and expectations.
When product teams are developing a new feature, it’s crucial to take the time to understand the significance of conducting user tests on prototypes and gathering feedback on product design before beginning the development process. Although this may cause a delay in the start of the development, it will ensure that the product team creates the right product.
Creating an innovative product doesn’t always require a technical breakthrough. When conducting user interviews and tests, identify the pain points and struggles of your users.
Based on this information, your product team can think outside the box and develop innovative solutions that address the needs of users. However, this kind of thinking requires you to cultivate a workplace that supports innovation in the first place. Encourage creativity and try to emphasize the importance of continuing to innovate even as the product evolves.
Creating a scalable product is essential for long-term success. To help you achieve this, it’s crucial to provide customized and tailored customer experience. By customizing your product for a particular user, you can make them feel seen and valued. However, you need to make sure that you utilize data to improve customer experience, not just to sell customers your product.
An excellent example of this is how Netflix uses customer data to offer content suggestions that resonate with them. In contrast, some social media platforms use customer data to push sponsored content, which tries to sell products without providing any actual value to users.
Many companies have moved away from traditional customer acquisition routes, opting to center the customer instead. However, this approach requires you to understand your customers deeply and create products that target their specific needs and concerns. As a PM, you should make sure your product team buys into and organizes around the approach.
To be successful though, you need to do more than just understand your customers. You’ll also need to build a strong relationship with your customers so that they trust that you’ll continue to provide them with value in the future. Good luck getting started!
Featured image source: IconScout
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