At the heart of every successful business is its ability to solve a problem. Most businesses are usually built around a specific problem they either desire to solve or already have the capacity to solve. A business’ ability to effectively solve that problem, and create a meaningful solution to that problem in the most suitable way for it users will have a very huge impact on the success of that business.
Therefore, the core goal of every successful business is to create value for its customers by creating a solution to a challenge they face. Profits are primarily a way to ensure the sustainability of the business is secured, and technology is the engine that empowers the whole process. However, the technology and the business is not as important as the ability of the business to solve the problem it was designed to solve. Without solving that problem, the technology is largely meaningless, and there is no business.
At the heart of every successful business is customer centricity. A customer centric business is a business that revolves primarily around the needs of its users and is laser focused on creating valuable solutions and solving the problems faced by its users. A customer centric business will usually be an innovative business, because at the heart of innovation is really simplicity and the creation of value for end users.
A good number of businesses focus their product development initiatives on creating more value for the business and utilizing some kind of technology. As much as there must be a perfect balance between technology, design and the business for innovation to occur, it is very important we realize that creating value for the end user by creating customer centric products is key to scaling and building out successful businesses and enterprises. Here are some ways to embrace customer centricity as a business;
How to Embrace Customer Centricity as a Business
Embrace Market Research
There are a plethora of businesses today that after what looked like a promising launch or demo day, ended up becoming unsuccessful businesses that lagged expectations and eventually had to shut down. According to research by CB Insights, more than 40% of startups fail because of the lack of a market need for their product.
It is therefore important as entrepreneurs that before embarking on any product development initiative, you don’t get carried away by passion, but spend time investing in both qualitative and quantitative market research. The mixture of both kinds of research is key; qualitative research will help you to first of all find out who has the problem you intend to solve, while quantitative research will help you find out what subset of the population has that problem, and if that will justify building out a solution. Effective market research is key to helping entrepreneurs avoid wasting time and resources building the wrong kind of products. Market research can also help entrepreneurs unravel and uncover certain other problems their target market suffers, and if it can be verified via quantitative research to be a problem a good number of people share, it could be the justification for a pivot, and the development of an entirely new product that wasn’t originally intended.
Embrace Design Thinking
Design thinking is an iterative framework for developing solutions that is comprised of five core phases. Design thinking helps both product teams and designers build solutions that have the interest of their users at heart at all time.
In design thinking, the user isn’t just a feature in the process, the user is at the center of the process.
Design thinking will usually start with an empathy session where the participants/multidisciplinary teams try to find out what the real problems their users are facing are. When this is done, participants switch to trying to define what the real problem their users are facing is. In some cases, this real problem could be restructured in a ‘How Might We’ statement that helps clarify the problem the users are having, and puts responsibility on the participants to find answers to those questions. The next step is an open stage of ideation where participants get to share ideas in tangible form (on paper or low defi mockups) detailing how their solution to the problem in question is valuable. The ideas gleaned at this stage are cleaned and filtered to pick out what is usually the three most promising ideas. The next step is to create product prototypes and put it in the hands of users to get their perspectives on the products in question. Insights from this phase could either be taken forward to continue and finally ship out the product or if the users perspective on the products were not what was expected, the iterative ability of the design thinking process may see you return back to the ideation, problem definition or even empathy phase to properly and clearly understand what is going on, and to redesign your approach.
Design thinking helps teams build customer centric products with multidisciplinary teams with varying levels of strength and expertise. The iterative process keeps development in a loop that allows developers and product team members eventually build out solutions that are properly customer centric.
Embracing the Agile Methodology
The Agile Methodology allows developers to build and deploy solutions in short two weeks to one month regular sprints to allow stakeholders have a good look at products in their nascent form and provide feedback on what could be a great product. Unlike the Water Fall product development process where all the features have been agreed upon even before the formal development process begins and there is little room for flexibility in feature addition when development begins, the Agile Product Development Process allows you to quickly build a lean product and show it to relevant stakeholders. The feedback gotten from these stakeholders helps define the next steps and what will eventually lie ahead.
The Agile Methodology also includes other processes like Scrum; which creates daily alignment amongst product development teams and Kanban; which is a very powerful way to visualize and manage projects as they are ongoing using what is called a Kanban board.
The Agile process is a powerful methodology for software development that allows teams build out solutions with the point of view and perspectives of the customers and other relevant stakeholders (including the business) constantly in play and in view.
Conclusion
Building and developing customer centric products and solutions is a very effective way to guarantee the success and growth of any business. Performing market research, embracing the design thinking process and embracing Agile development methodologies are some of the most effective ways to build and encourage customer and user centricity in any business.
