Avoid these 4 digital bloopers

Your digital team is busy creating amazing experiences for a kick-ass product. You have all the usual ingredients to set them up for success — a cool collaborative workspace, post-its & markers, a table-tennis board, and an endless supply of premium coffee. Go a step further by avoiding these 4 common digital bloopers and ensuring your team’s hard work is not tripped up.

Delivery teams perform research from a blank page perspective to discover customer needs, features, and experiences of a product — a focus on product value to the customer. Management, however, often uses it to confirm their initial hypotheses and business case in order to justify budget allocation and continued spend — a focus on defending a tabled idea.

The latter focus causes people to fall victim to “counting the hits and ignoring the misses”, confirmation bias, and even worse, manipulation and erroneous interpretation of what customer insights are actually saying. Often teams are prevented from taking a blank page perspective because the assumptions of the business case are considered “sacred cows” and are not allowed to be challenged (which is invariably where blank page discovery goes)

Using customer research to defend ideas may provide an organization with confidence while waiting for the release of a product, but ultimately when a product launches and the adoption is low — as it doesn’t meet what customers really need — everyone loses. Be brave and tenacious in ensuring that your customer research is set up to truly inform product features and test customer adoption.

Teams often believe they have a clear view of what customers want — usually because of the amount of time they’ve been in a particular industry, or because they consider themselves close enough to the customer to represent their needs. In this case, ongoing customer research is largely ignored as it is regarded as a waste of time because certainty has already been established.

Often, team members have a decent view of major customer pain points and so the feature sets of a product (the ‘what’) might be clear. The problem is the lack of customer involvement in discovering ‘how’ customers want the features to meet their needs. This results in the right features, but the wrong experience. There are many products boasting rich feature sets that lose out to products with smaller feature sets offering superior experience.

Significant time, money and effort is being spent on your product, don’t skimp out on customer research because of a belief that a few seemingly knowledge people have cracked customer needs in terms of “what” they want, and “how” they want it.

I’ve seen many teams start off with inspiring hackathons and exciting new ideas and features, but end up constraining all their innovative thinking to broadly fit within existing products and experiences. Be wary of the pull to keep things the same, which can manifest in logic such as “our customer base is not ready for this type of experience”, or “our customers are used to the existing experience”. Such thinking will have you building your existing experience with only a modified look and feel.

Sometimes it is necessary to unleash the pain of adaptation on your customers in order to provide them with a superior experience. I recall launching a new log-in feature for a banking website that replaced lengthy card numbers with customer-chosen usernames and passwords. It was a much simpler method, however, there was initially a substantial backlash from customers. Customers had become so accustomed to using the existing log-in method, that it was more painful for them to create credentials once-off than to remember 16 digit card numbers. A few years on, and the customer base is now accustomed to the new approach and nobody would choose to go back to the old method of logging in.

Take calculated risks on releasing a new experience to your customers knowing that some of your customers won’t like your new product or reimagined experience in the short term as they adapt. Some customers will never like it, but ultimately, you should aim for the overwhelming majority of customers to benefit from the reimagined experience.

I’ve often come across teams whose only real goal is meeting a timeline. This is probably the single biggest reason for product failures. When a short timeframe is dictated and delivery must be completed within it otherwise the end of the world will take place, sensible practices go out the window.

Teams start with customer research but this quickly gets shelved because “there is no time to change”. In addition, products start degenerating to smaller and smaller feature sets just to make a timeline. Stakeholders are seldom happy with the result because the product feature set is too small and the experience is sub-optimal. Customers are even more unhappy. There is a difference between an MVP/MMP and an insufficient product!

Companies that get this right understand that customer value, and not schedule adherence, is a measure of success. So when timelines change, this is not considered a team failure but a step in ensuring success by focusing on experience and quality.

There are no formulas for product success, but there certainly are formulas that drive failure. Keep an honest eye out for these and you stand a greater of product success.

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