Customer Seat at the Table
“Hear the customer’s voice, invite continuous feedback and validation”
Overview
This pillar captures the concept of being a customer-focused organization where decisions about the products are made based on aligning customer needs and wants with the overall goals of the organization. To achieve this, users and customers are engaged early and often, the “voice of the customer” is made real and is used throughout the product development process, and feedback from users and customers is incorporated and helps drive product decisions. To get the customer a seat at the table, the organization uses various techniques including user personas, journey maps, product experiments (minimum viable products and prototypes), customer interviews and focus groups.
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Problems We Are Solving
- Large feature backlogs that are not validated
- Missed market opportunities
- Customer feedback comes too late and at a high cost
- Product teams are not skilled at ‘Discovery’
- Product discovery teams are not working ahead of delivery teams
Desired Outcomes
- Customers are accurately identified, well understood and provide feedback throughout the discovery and development process. Measure: Higher satisfaction, engagement and usage of features delivered. Increase # of customers.
- Ideas are tested incrementally and only the best ideas move forward. Measure: Lower number of features on the backlog and less WIP.
- Product discovery is deliberate, mature and ahead of delivery. Measure: Delivery teams always have their next experiments/MVPs ready to work on.
Competencies
This pillar focuses on the below competencies. The Learn More links take customers and certified EBA Strategists to resources inside our measurement and growth platform, AgilityHealth. Use your AgilityHealth login to access.
Understanding Your Customer
Customer personas and journey maps are used in conducting opportunity assessments to identify customers, define customer segments, understand problems for those customers and determine whether there is a viable market opportunity. Learn More
Discovery & Validation
Problem and solution discovery evolves the opportunity assessment by narrowing in on specific problems and potential solutions to test ideas and learn. This process is used to determine which solutions will move forward for development. Learn More
Customer Focus & Engagement
Once a solution has been selected, the product is developed incrementally and with an experimental mindset to continue to engage and incorporate feedback from the customer. Product validation and optimization is the process of fine-tuning a product through measuring and tracking feedback from customers as independent improvements are implemented and tested. Learn More
Related Radar Assessments
Enterprise Business Agility Radar
The EBA Radar provides a holistic assessment for a portfolio or line of business around the 7 pillars needed to succeed.
Lean Product Health Radar
This assessment helps your Product and Portfolio Leadership team assess their current Lean Product Management maturity so they can identify strengths and areas for improvement.
Related Workshops & Jump Starts
Lean Product Discovery
Develop a deeper, more nuanced understanding of your customers and the products and services they’re looking for. In this workshop, we will leverage Discovery and Rapid Prototyping practices to get validated, high-impact solutions to market faster.
Form the Discovery Team
This 1 day applied workshop focuses on exploring best practices in Discovery Team formation and methods and producing a clear, actionable plan to form and sustain a Discovery Team.
Patterns and Best Practices
