Name: Continuous Discovery Habits
Rating: 4.2 (247 reviews)
Author: Teresa Torres

What’s in it for me? Uncover your customers’ changing needs.

The most successful companies are adept at giving their customers what they want. But in a fast-changing world, what the customer wants is constantly evolving. That’s where this Blink comes in. You’ll discover a new way to approach product development, so that you can stay on top of your customers’ shifting needs.

You’ll explore methods of conceptualizing opportunities, and reveal the differences between your business outputs and your customer outcomes. From brainstorming, to market research, to teamwork, this is your go-to guide for creating better products that set you apart from your competitors.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

why you should always brainstorm alone;
the one question you should ask your customer; and
how to map your opportunity space.

Focusing on outcomes over outputs will help you create the right products for your customers.

What’s the difference between an output and an outcome? Knowing the answer might make all the difference to your business.

Let’s start by taking a look at what an output is. An output is a thing. This thing might be a product, or it might just be a feature of a product. If you ask your product team what their outputs are, they will point to all the great products that are sitting on your business’s shelves, or those products’ features, which they have designed.

Now let’s look at what an outcome is. A business outcome is not a thing; it’s a change. Maybe it’s a change in your business’s bottom line, or it might be a change in your customers’ behavior, or a change in customer-satisfaction levels. Outcomes are about the impacts that your company’s products have on your customers, or on your business itself.

Now that we’re clear on the difference between an output and an outcome, let’s ask another question: What should your company be focusing on, outputs or outcomes?

The answer is always outcomes. When you focus on outcomes over outputs, you put your customer at the heart of your business. Your product team starts by looking at what outcome they would want to achieve for your customers, and then thinks about what products to build or tweak, in order to make those outcomes a reality. This is the way to do things.

When the focus is on outputs, the product team comes up with a concept for a product first and only later thinks about what customer need or desire that product might serve. This is not the way to do things.

Let’s take a look at this difference in action.

Product consultant Teresa Torres worked with a custom-made dog-food company’s product team. This team started by thinking about what outcome they wanted for their customers. They decided that they wanted to improve their customers’ understanding of just how healthy their custom-made dog food was. If more customers realized how good their food was for their dogs, the product team figured that they would keep buying the food, month after month. With this outcome in mind, the product team set about experimenting with methods of improving their customers’ knowledge of their food. They made changes to the way they explained their product to customers, and then measured whether these changes had any impact on how many customers continued to subscribe to their dog-food service. This focus on outcomes, rather than outputs, allowed them to keep their customers’ needs at the heart of their operations.

Choose the right outcome, and dedicate enough time to achieving it.

When your product team starts focusing on outcomes over outputs, you can expect to see a boost in your business’s overall performance. But only if you manage to sidestep common pitfalls along the way. So let’s take a look at some typical mistakes product teams make.

The best product teams carefully map their opportunities.

If you’re in the business of creating new products, then you might have been told that it's your job to solve your customers' problems. But, in reality, you’re not in the problem-solving business; you’re in the business of opportunity. So let’s start to explore the myriad opportunities for creating products that your customers will love.

Product teams need to generate lots of ideas – from their customers and from themselves.

When you start to conduct customer interviews, you might encounter an unexpected problem. It may feel like your interviewees just don’t have a lot to say. They may well give you short answers to your questions and leave you feeling as if they haven’t given you the in-depth answers you were looking for. Let’s explore this challenge, as well as its polar opposite: what to do when your interviewees have too much to say.

Kernaussagen in Continuous Discovery Habits