Time-to-Value: Ensuring your digital product's success

By focusing on a prescribed release date, teams regularly fall into the trap of immediately gathering feature requirements from internal stakeholders who serve as the anointed ‘voice of the customer’. Regrettably, many of these individuals rarely interact with end-users. Next, the captured requirements are transformed into user stories that are refined and prioritized for developers to build into specific features. Finally, the product or service is built, then tested against user acceptance criteria and released to achieve the deadline.  

When using this approach, often not a single real customer or end-user is involved in the product discovery or design process. That’s why this doesn’t work well – it relies on internal proxies who are usually incorrect in their assumptions about customers. Even worse, the criteria chosen to validate that a feature is acceptable to end-users relies on the same set of requirements prescribed by the ‘voice of the customer’ stakeholder – a classic case of circular reasoning. 

To summarize, there are three key deficiencies in relying on an output-driven, time-to-market approach: 

1. It’s all done without understanding the outcomes a customer or end-user wants to achieve – the specific jobs to be done
2. It doesn’t include the important step of identifying the problems or pain points that stand in the customer’s way of completing their task
3. It overlooks the creative and innovative problem–solving required to test different concepts and validate a desirable, viable and feasible solution before it’s brought to market

Through an outcome-driven and experience-led approach, our clients have adopted a proven, repeatable method that enables them to successfully deliver customer and business value. It requires ongoing interaction with both end-users and business stakeholders to ensure the customer experience being designed and developed will deliver on the outcomes and time-to-value required for success.

Understanding the requirements for a specific feature or function is important when trying to define what needs to be built. Unfortunately, it’s done far too early in the product discovery and design process. Successful digital products require an early and ongoing focus on end-users to identify and solve the problems that stand in the way of customers achieving their outcomes. Success lies in solving customer problems not gathering feature requirements.  

Nortal recently worked with a large wholesale distribution company that wanted to generate more e-commerce sales by reinvigorating its mobile channel with modern capabilities, enabled by a new tech platform. Instead of starting with stakeholder requirements and feature backlogs, we helped our client engage current customers and partner stores to better understand the outcomes each group wanted to achieve. Along the way, we collaboratively explored the problems that stood in the way of accomplishing specific jobs to be done.  

Here are few simple but insightful questions we raised with real end-users: 

1. The outcome: what is the job you are hoping to get done?
2. The value: what is the result of getting the job done?
3. The problem: what pain points stand in the way of getting the job done?

With these actionable insights, Nortal helped the client ideate potential solutions for the customer problems raised. We then prototyped specific end-user experiences that addressed high priority pain points, allowing customers to realize quicker time-to-value in the jobs they completed. Rather than starting with feature requirements, our client now has a customer-focused solution that was outcome-driven and experience-led.   

In addition to designing the new mobile solution for customer value and usability, we also assessed it for business viability and tech feasibility. Using the same approach, we explored what problems stood in the way of delivering the desired business outcomes. This helped our client identify the business functions i.e. sales, marketing, operations, and customer success, needed to support an improved mobile end-user experience. Improvements in customer time-to-value, sales and profits will follow. We then explored how these capabilities could be more effectively enabled through data, technology, people and processes – resulting in a new solution architecture for the mobile app. 

Old habits die hard. Unfortunately, many companies continue to develop new digital products through stakeholder-focused and requirements-led efforts. While these approaches might offer comfort in predicting when the product is ready for launch, they carry a significant risk of building digital products and services that customers don’t want and the business doesn’t need. 

Rather than institute sweeping changes to your product development efforts, we recommend experimenting with a few outcome-driven and experience-led methods using the customer-focused principles described above. For example, the next time you have a new product or feature to build, try the following steps: 

1. Conduct 1:1 research interviews with a select group of real customers
2. Ask end-users about their outcomes to achieve and the problems that stand in their way
3. Test different concepts with end-users and then prototype and validate a solution that enables customers to realize quicker time-to-value

Nortal’s global Product & Customer Experience team have crafted a 3-part series on how to create products customers want and your business needs. To read on to the next part of the series, click below.