Customer-inspired

One of the lasting beliefs in the product world is that good products come from paying attention to the needs of customers (or potential customers). But Jeff Bezos says: “No customer ever asked Amazon to create Prime membership.”

The reason is that in technology products:

• customers do not know what is possible.
• customers do not know what they want.

The truth is that customers are not always the source of value creation and innovation. That does not mean we ignore our customers. Quite the opposite: it means we must look for the source of innovation and inspiration in other places.

So what is the origin of innovation? There are many reasons and sources for innovation. In my view, if you use your engineers and development team only for coding, you are in fact using only about half of their value.

In this article I want to go further into this: that strong product teams in fact use their engineers’ talent. Many people think it is the founder’s or product manager’s job to decide what feature to build, and the programmers’ job to build it. It seems clear enough.

If you are reading this, stay with us so we can look at a few examples of innovation together with technology. I want to share stories of several well-known innovations of the present, along with how existing product capacity was used and how they were customer-inspired and discovered.

Amazon Alexa

Amazon is one of the leading companies in being customer-inspired and using innovation in its projects. It is easy to cite dozens of examples of their innovative work.

One of the large innovations that is fully successful now but in my view is only just getting started is Alexa. But as usual this product was not the result of some grand plan and strategy. It started by designing an initial tool (Amazon Echo) as a simple music player. But one of the engineers saw the potential in this technology and created a prototype in which the speaker could act as a voice controller for a player and a television. That discovery was one of the defining moments for the product team. And the prototype let the development team see the potential of this device and its services as a smart-home hub. Today Alexa has become a complete platform, with several capabilities beyond playing music.

Disney MagicBand

Amazon is one of the companies that came into being and grew with the emergence and progress of technology. But how does innovation work in companies with a traditional structure? Disney parks (Disneyland Park) have been operating for more than 60 years. But in 2011 there was a risk that Disney parks would become victims of their own extraordinary success. Long lines in different parts of the park and overcrowding were annoying people and reducing how often visitors returned. Going to a Disney park no longer had the old appeal. So at first Disney gathered a team of business managers in the technology domain and asked them to define a new experience of being in a Disney park for customers and keep those customers attached to Disney. That became known as the next-generation experience, or NGE.

This new vision affected every aspect, from how a guest entered the park, a person’s daily plan in the park, using food service, hotel booking, medical exams and personal treatment, and so on. They also built prototypes of RFID-based wearable gadgets known as MagicBand.

As you can guess, developing this new world depended on updating very old infrastructure. And Disney accepted that risk with a $1 billion investment in new digital infrastructure for its theme parks. Large companies, besides using technology, need leadership and courage to take some large risks.

Customers had not asked for MagicBand in any way. Designers and engineers saw customer dissatisfaction and used technology to reimagine and recreate the guest user experience. If you have not yet had a chance to try this new experience, we hope you try it. [The author does not know that we live in Iran — translator.] Because these changes have been very striking, and you can see how they have created an excellent platform for many guests.

Google Translate

Google Translate was one of Google’s less-seen services. It has now been about 10 years since it was introduced, and in that time the service has grown steadily. Today more than half a billion people around the world use this service every month. Google Translate has been able to grow and attract many users by supporting 103 living languages around the world, in both online and offline ways, especially through mobile devices. In this case, reaching acceptable translation quality was very difficult. At the start, and most of the time, people described Google Translate as “better than nothing.” But that was not because of a lack of effort from the development team. All of that has changed, however. In recent years this team has made very striking progress in improving translation quality.

What changed? User need and being customer-inspired caused Google to value this service of theirs much more seriously. Google engineers realized there was a new technology that could dramatically improve the quality of results and the user experience (machine learning). This is a completely lean example of using technology to create a better user experience. In this case, Google’s managers started using it without publicly announcing these changes, to see whether users would notice the improvements on their own. And that happened. (Users understood.)

Google, like many other strong companies, uses this new technology to improve many of its services.

Apple iPhone

You probably know that iPhone is the name of the mobile phones produced by Apple. But the initial effort to build and ship the iPhone is a leading example of being customer-inspired and of initiatives that come from market need and have technology. What many people do not know is that when the iPhone was being designed, the leaders of the smartphone day were BlackBerry, Palm, Nokia, and Motorola. These companies were working hard on their next smartphone; in contrast, Apple, using its engineers, was busy collecting information from study groups.

Many people think the iPhone was the first phone based on touchscreen technology. But it was not. The Palm Treo was very popular at the time. And besides having a touchscreen, it also had a keyboard in the style of BlackBerry phones. Even so, its touchscreen was terrible. What do you think users’ opinion of that product was? They suggested you remove the touchscreen!

But Apple’s engineers saw the potential of this technology. And they worked hard to produce a device that used this technology to meet customer needs.

Workiva WDesk

You might think that to innovate in this area you have to be Google, Apple, or Disney; but that is not always true. We only used them as examples because you know them. Workiva is a company you may never have heard of. Even so, in the first few years of starting work they were a very successful company. They focus on a type of customer that gets less attention: finance and accounting employees working in every large public and private company. These people work continuously in the company, and most of their effort goes unnoticed by others. But Workiva’s founders met some of these people and saw their problem.

There were already several other enterprise software vendors for this market; but most of those companies offered weak examples. They literally built what customers asked for. In contrast the Workiva team was very strong technically. They designed a new solution, and very soon they invested in a few enabling key technologies and trends: cloud infrastructure and an advanced, rich, applied system for repetitive applications on the web.

They also believed that using advanced technology would help them attract and retain top engineers. That makes it possible to keep offering disruptive, innovative solutions. This focus on truly caring for customers by offering advanced, technology-enabled solutions has made them very popular among large businesses.

Keys to using strong engineers

What I want to talk about now is how you should interact with your engineers so you can get the best return. You need people who bring credibility to your organization. In fact, without that you have little hope of real innovation. But fortunately most active, strong companies in technology have powerful engineers.

Here are my six suggested methods for using the full capacity of engineers:

1. Provide engineers with the context of the work.

Your engineers must understand the business context. So many CEOs and product managers think they should keep their engineers away from the details of customer contact. In truth nothing is worse than that. These engineers are the people who can save you; but they need to become familiar with the customer’s mindset. So share vision, strategy, analysis, business goals, contract requirements, and legal issues with them. Anything that might affect the product.

2. Familiarize engineers with customer sensitivities

The development team must closely touch the customer’s need. They really want to help solve these problems or needs. You cannot ask the customer what should be built. But instead, you require them to use prototypes or the current product or anything else they use today (or try to use). With this method, and by using customer inspiration and user behavior, you can understand what actions should be taken for the product.

3. Understand constraints and needs

Many people in companies, and also your customers, try to help engineers by providing requirements along with constraints. This is rarely needed. The product manager’s job is to identify the essential constraints—legal, financial, sales, marketing, production, and so on—and then reduce these constraints for the development team. The result of this is a significantly greater degree of freedom for the engineering team in solving the customer’s or the business’s core problem.

4. Give engineers time

Many teams essentially work like a small software factory. The product manager issues new work to the technical team for execution. And engineers constantly try to get this work done faster. That is not why good product-development companies work well. You should know this key point: before you decide to spend time and money building a real product, giving engineers a period of time is one of the best things you can do for return on investment. Most experienced engineers will tell you that a few hours of focus before starting work can save a great deal in the production cycle.

5. Measure the product team as a whole

Some teams make a big mistake of measuring the technical team with one metric and product managers with another. This issue shows up as a common problem with OKRs, where engineers have one set of quarterly objectives and key results and product managers have other goals; this is exactly the wrong approach for product teams. The team must be precisely aligned in terms of work.

6. Competent, trusted product managers

Finally, everything here depends on how engineers interact with an innovative, intelligent manager or product manager. The product manager brings deep customer knowledge, deep data knowledge, deep industry knowledge, and deep knowledge of many aspects of your company that affect the product (such as sales, marketing, legal, finance, and so on). The job of being customer-inspired sits with the product manager. They must also have the self-confidence needed to collaborate with their engineers. Strong product managers actively engage with the technical team’s views. And in contrast they feel they have to know everything. So many teams do not understand the value of their engineers, because an authoritative product manager is not accompanying the team. Just note that if you think a product manager is someone with a product-owner certificate, you certainly have this problem too.

Keep in mind that not all engineers are interested in the details of the product and the relationships between employer and company. Even so, this level of engagement seems essential for achieving necessary innovation. In every product team you need at least one engineer who is willing and able to collaborate at this level. And my favorite product teams are groups where every engineer is engaged in this; but that needs a culture that accepts this work as valuable. This is the best state of a mature team.

So if you do not see the level of innovation your business needs, I hope you try the proposed way of working and see for yourself what great things an aligned team can do.

This piece is a translation of the article “Customer Inspired, Technology Enabled,” which you can access in the original at this page.