Celia and Joseph came back to the workshop after lunch filled with customer information. They had been instructed to dig into their customer’s point of view and their emotional measures of success, what made them feel good about working through their tasks. The topic had been presented during the customer empathy discussion that morning. The teams had interviewed a few customers during the lunch hour and what they heard changed how they viewed their product offering.
“Our customer is ‘hiring’ our product to do something that we never envisioned when we developed the solution,” said Celia. “I wonder how many other customers are using it this way?” Using the “hiring” nomenclature when talking about their solution was new for them. It essentially moved the conversation away from a product point of view, e.g. “We’re selling a drill” to a job their customer hired their product to do, e.g. “They are hiring us to make holes.”
Kim’s experience was different then Celia’s. “The customer I interviewed is using our product exactly how we envisioned it, but it’s not helping them complete their task,” she said. “How do we synthesize these two very different perspectives into something we can use to build higher value solutions?”
The key was to group their customers by their tasks or their job-to-be-done. The afternoon session of the workshop started with developing a point of view for their customers. Based on what they had heard and observed, they would capture what their customer said and did, and look for consistencies and discrepancies. Their point of views started with a description of what the customer said or did. Who was their customer? What were their aspirations?
“My customer was a white male, age 35, with a degree in social sciences,” Kim started the discussion. But this demographic information really told them nothing about their customer. A 35-year-old white male could share the same point of view as a 70-year-old African American female. Instead they needed to dig deeper into who their customers really were by looking at their values, what they cared about.
“My customer is a single mom with 2 kids in elementary school, working as an accountant and teaching yoga at a local gym,” said Celia. This was better; it allowed them to envision their customer from a human perspective. Next they turned to their customer’s goals and aspirations. How did they describe the task they were attempting to complete? Kim and Celia compared notes on their customers’ tasks and captured them next to their descriptions.
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Last, they delved into the problem their customer needed them to solve. While the tendency was to focus on the problem they were already solving for their customer, they dug deeper to look at unmet needs. “My customer often gets her work done late at night, after her kids are asleep,” said Celia. “That’s when she needs us to help her, when she is feeling most creative and productive.”
“My customer uses our solution throughout the day. He needs to be able to easily pick up where he left off,” said Kim. They mapped the two problems next to their customer description and task to complete these point-of-views. “I wonder how many of our customers are working on these same two tasks. Or if there are different point-of-views we haven’t even discovered yet.” She could see how their customer discovery work was just beginning. The point-of-view framework gave them a great way to capture their customer’s perception of their product. And from there, they could see common themes in the problems their customers needed them to solve.
“Sounds like we need to talk to a bunch more customers,” said Celia, her eyes gleaming. Getting grounded on real problems they could solve for their customers was fun, and those problems provided a path for increasing the value of their solutions for their customer.
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