Customer Development and the Evolutionary Approach to Project Development

In the success of the project "Customer Development" (at the initial stage) plays a crucial role. Of course, successfully conducted “Customer Development” in itself does not guarantee the success of the project, but if it is not conducted, or conducted poorly, this greatly reduces the likelihood of success. The phrase evolutionary approach in the title is included because, I believe that the process of "Customer Development" should be on the entire life cycle of the project, and not only at its initial stage.

At the initial stage, the Customer Development process should follow one of the branches: your product has value propositions, which have no analogues on the market; The product has analogues and competitors already on the market.
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There are no product analogues on the market

That this is the case, you need to make sure of this, conduct research. Otherwise, you risk reinventing the wheel. Interview with a client is not an easy process. Here you need to be a psychologist and a sociologist. Either you have the ability to conduct such interviews from nature, or they need to be developed, and this needs to be learned. It is necessary to possess analytical skills in order, after a series of interviews, to draw the right conclusions, find and highlight common patterns that will satisfy the needs of all (or most) of the respondents. By the way, for interviewing it is useful to use the six rules of Gleb Zheglov when working with a witness, which he outlined in the film “The meeting place cannot be changed”. If the process in this branch was long, after completing it is necessary to see if there were any competitors during this time, and to make possible corrections if this happened.

There are competitors on the market

I will not dwell on the issues of competition on price offers. This is easily calculated and not the only problem of this branch. You need to find and realize the functional benefits of your solution. It is necessary to interview users of competitors. To try out the problems they face when working with the product, and to take these problems into account in their product. This is also not easy to do. If the user has worked only with this product, does not have experience with other analogues, he may simply not be aware of the problems and inconveniences and not tell you about them. In the past, I worked on a project for Panasonic. The project was supposed to transfer employees from using an existing application to a new one. I did not conduct an interview, but spent three days observing how people work with an existing application, saw problem areas and took them into account in our design. This gave results, the transition was painless, and the company was ready to order new developments from us. So sometimes it is useful not to ask users, but just to look at their work with the application. In addition to finding flaws in competitors' products, there is another important aspect of the problem: the habit and unwillingness to relearn a new product, even if it is better than the current one. When Microsoft Word first appeared, he already had a strong competitor to Word Perfect. Microsoft has implemented the ability for the user to select the Word Perfect or Microsoft command set. I am sure that this had the effect of poaching users already working in another application. If your product has the ability to choose an interface style, and one of the available styles will be similar and remind you of a competitor's product, this will be an additional positive factor when deciding to switch to your product.

Customer Development in the process of project evolution.

Users have already started using your product. You should not stop the process of "Customer Development", but you must transfer it to a new stage. Not all users will receive feedback: suggestions for improvements, comments on any inconvenience when using your product. It is very useful to create a toolkit that will allow you to automatically control how the product is used. Keep a record of user sequences when working with the application. Which panels open, which reports are requested, which buttons and in which sequence are clicked. This will make it possible to select interface elements and functionality that is not used or is used very rarely, and remove it, make it less accessible or, on the contrary, more visible. This will make it possible to single out chains of user actions that are often performed, and replace them with one action (by implementing one button instead of, for example, three) or regroup the fields in the application panels.

In the project, the ViaLatM service implements a tool for logging user actions, after collecting statistics, I will share its results and provide data on changes in the application made based on the analysis of the use of the application by users.