Here’s a handy graphic illustrating source and bias:

If one looks closely, one can perhaps discern my bias. ; )

Let’s go through these.

1. Those with marketing backgrounds are comfortable speaking with customers in a manner determined by their specific role.  Product Managers talk about road map, collect feature requests and bounce ideas off customers, often in group settings (focus groups, advisory boards, etc.).  Product Marketers communicate features and benefits and elicit feedback, often through surveys.  Corporate marketers practice “branding” and spin.  Feedback goes to info@ email boxes, twitter tweets, and Facebook ‘Likes’ (or not).

2. UX Designers are quick to tell you they invented Customer Development only called it something different.  And frankly, they’re right to a degree.  When it comes to product design.  Or parts of product design.  Anyway, UX Designers are good at observing user behavior and interacting with them in a particular (not peculiar) way to determine if the product is “working.”  This is instrumental to today’s products.  (Not always the case, as I’ll argue in another post.)

3. Engineers, in their lifetime quest to never have to actually speak to a live animal of the “Customer” species, utilizes analytics tools and product instrumentation to produce reams of data on user behavior, i.e., actual user interaction with the product.  Instrumentation is instrumental, too.

4. Penultimately and leastly, are the investors, branders, Madison-Ave marketers, turn-key salespeople, high-tech gadflies and backseat pundits who declare that Vision is the only thing that matters.  All you have to do is be like Apple and Ikea, get it?  Do I have to spell it out for you?  All you have to do is be just like A-P-P-L-E.  There now, go to it.

5. Finally, what is the Customer Development bias?  Customer Development needs all the practices above, but none of them help you understand the problem, the pain, the passion. That’s the final leg or better yet, the first leg of Customer Development.  Empathy.  Whatever walk for mankind you need to do to walk a mile in your customers’ shoes; whatever interview technique, lunch buying, drink toting, teatotaling, karaoke yodeling you must participate in to gain an understanding such that you feel empathy.

Now, then, can’t we all just get along?

Please excuse the hyperbole and generalities and the tongue-in-cheek.  Recuse yourself as you see fit.  Feel free to post vitriol in comments. : )

The tension comes from learning when to ignore your customers and when to take heed. Custdevguy reminds us that customers have their own agenda, which might not coincide with your own. Steve Blank reminds us that Customer Development is not just collecting web metrics and it’s not about focus groups. I’ve written before that Customers own the pain, Founders own the vision, meaning that as an entrepreneur, you must tailor your vision to solve the customer’s pain. That is the objective of speaking with your customers.

Sean Ellis perhaps says it best, describing the process as “honing in” on the “signal” that is the core value proposition of your product to your customer. What’s valuable about this description to me, is that rather than looking at what you need to ask each customer, it provides a high-level perspective on what your objective should be and how to get there.  It’s talking to enough customer and asking whatever questions necessary to hone in on the core value of the product.

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Back in November, I decided I wanted to go to do something different for the holidays this year; something fun and a little different, and perhaps a little adventurous with my two girls.  I decided that we would go to Seattle to visit my sister and her family, who have kids the same age as mine, and from there we’ll rent a cabin in the woods and go play in the snow.  That was my “vision.”  When I told my kids we were going to visit their cousins in Seattle, they didn’t want to go. Now, I had a pretty good idea why, but I asked anyway and they gave me the ones I guessed, but others I hadn’t thought of:

1. I’d rather just stay home
2. Usually we only get along with the kids the first day
3. What will we do? It’s just boring to hang out there
4. They don’t celebrate Christmas

Now, listening to your kids is part of being a good parent.  Always doing what they want, not so much; you could end up spending an inordinate amount of time, for example, at McDonalds.  I night characterize the 4 objections I received this way:

1. stasis
2. fear
3. features aren’t appealing
4. visions don’t match

As the owner of the vision, I need to somehow deal with each of these, while keeping these particular customers happy.  (If I fail, my vision fails.)

1. I know my customers well.  This is a standard response. Staying where you are is a known experience and for many, that is preferable to the unknown even when the unknown offers big upside. This is definitely not an “early adopter” mentality.
2. Similar to 1), but in this case a there’s a specific problem with a feature that the customer can clearly articulate. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s true.  In this case it’s not.  I remind my customers of all the great times they have had in the past, they come back with examples of problems, etc.  Actually just talking the issues through, makes my customers feel better.
3. In this particular case, the features weren’t articulated well by mean.  In other words, my messaging was poor.  When I explained that we wouldn’t only be hanging out in Seattle, that we were going to the mountains and the snow, most of the objections went away. I provided a means for my customers to perform a cost-benefit analysis.
4. I honestly hadn’t considered this point and I could see that it was extremely important to my customer.  Was it possible to fix this and maintain the vision?  In the end, it was not difficult to at all.  My sister was happy to celebrate Christmas in the cabin.  While we wouldn’t have a tree, we could hang stockings and exchange a few presents.  We could even have a  White Christmas!  Problem solved.

BTW, we continued to “add features” throughout the trip that required more “customer development.”  Multiple times the adults said “we’re going to do this (go for a walk, snow shoe hike, etc.),” each time met with derision from the kids; each time resulting in a good time for all.  Children, like customers, sometimes must simply be (are looking to be) led.

This is perhaps a silly example, but I thought it illustrates several points:

• Founder owns the vision
• Communication with customers hones the vision, reveals customer pain and exposes emotional objections to features
• Companies must reject some customer requests, e.g. those run counter to the vision
• Companies must effectively message the value of the vision, features, etc.

Hope you all had a great season, I did!  : )

Words are powerful and and the intent of catchy phrases can be lost when removed from their original context.  I brought this up before a few weeks back, when the “Fail Fast” meme was cruising through Twitter and among some cheerleaders, it seems, failing itself had become the best means to success, as if it were the end objective, as if tripping your way to finish line will ensure you are the winner.

So it goes, IMO, with this quote about the customer’s vision:

Early customers are often more visionary than the startup they work with for that product.

I’m not so sure.  So while the initial intent of the phrase is not to misplace ownership of the vision, I fear (perhaps unwarrantedly so) that upon oft-repeats or retweets, that the wrong message emerges.  Not to repeat myself, but one has to treat customer input carefully.

Customers are inherently egocentric and have a limited view.  Their motivation is to solve problems that will increase their market share, increase revenue, or decrease expenses.   They certainly don’t wish to solve their competitor’s problems, though you would be happy to solve both.

“Visionary” customers make up a statistically insignificant portion of your market.

Visionary customers likely understand the problem you’re trying to solve better than you.  They may be working internally to solve the problem.  But the objective of their solution is to solve their internal issues, not achieve your greater market vision. (If they are trying to solve that, they are a competitor, not a customer.)

This is not wordsmithing or semantics, but rather is an important distinction.  The right visionary customers for you are ones who illuminate the path toward achieving your vision.

Is Google’s vision better than Yahoo’s because Google ceded their vision to their customers?

The danger in relying the customer’s vision is that in truth, the customer is not always right.  Their limited perspective and selfish (rightfully so) objectives means they will, if it is in their best interests, change your product to fit their needs.  If you have several customers doing this, and you opportunistically give each customer what they’re asking for, you will face an untenable situation that will prevent you from scaling the business.

Facts Exist Outside the Building, Opinions Reside Within

Your vision.   Your assumptions about your vision.  Test your assumptions.  Validate the vision.  Allow customers to shape your vision.  (This is really tough!  Are speaking with the right customer?)

Non-visionary customers know the features they want.  But customer development is not about gathering feature requirements.  So early on, you must be speaking with early adopters or if you can find them, visionary customers.  As Sean O’Malley says,

[Vision] should be built by triangulating as many inputs as possible.

Here lies the intuitive and creative part of being an entrepreneur.  You are the pied piper, who plays snippets of music you hear customers humming.  You need to select — all through product development, not just at startup time — the minimum features required to keep existing customers satisfied and acquire new ones within your defined segment, while heading toward fulfilling your vision.

Intuit didn’t know that printing checks was going to be the “killer feature” that would win the day (until they talked to customers), but they did envision that a financial management system that made it easy for home computer users to pay bills could be a big winner.

At SuperMac, desktop publishers bought their graphics cards because they solved their application problems.  But Steve Blank had the marketing vision to implement a strategy to target desktop publishers.

Friends & family, employees, partners, customers, investors, analysts & media will all attempt to alter your vision based on their personal experiences and needs.

In The Four Steps to the Epiphany, Steve Blank writes:

[Visionary Customers] are a special breed of customers willing to take a risk on your startup’s product or service because they can actually envision its [your product!] potential to solve a critical and immediate problem]

Your product.  Your vision.  The customer is the expert about their problem.  You may need to shape your vision as you learn more about the problem.

You must skate the fine line between holding onto your vision, while receiving input that helps shape the vision and providing the path toward achieving it.

Comments are welcome!

See where the people walk and then pave their path.

How many times have you seen two sidewalks intersecting at 90 degree angles, with worn grass cutting the corners?

There’s a fine line between executing on your vision and listening to your customers.  Consider Mumford’s quote, thinking of the sidewalk as the “vision” and the path as “customer needs.”

I help entrepreneurs create investment pitches and so sit through a lot dry runs, where they practice presenting their vision to real entrepreneurs and investors.  The most painful part of the process (once we get beyond the creation of a basic elevator pitch) is listening to the critique of the vision, rather than the pitch.  Inevitably, the audience offers recommendations on how to change the product, the customer or the business model.  The audience tells the CEO how they would do it, if it were their business.

It is certainly understandable that business plan critics would lean on their own experiences.  Yet, if you asked each one about their past successes, and they will inevitably answer that they “stuck to their vision.”

But what of the customer?  If you’ve happened by this blog before, you might have run across the term “customer development.” : )  So how does one listen to the customer and stick to the vision?

How to accomplish this balance?

First, you must be able to clearly articulate your vision.  Your vision includes your customer, the problem you’re solving, and how you’re solving it.  My suspicion is that the harder to explain the softer the vision. Hence the oft-repeated question, is your product a vitamin or pain killer?

Test your assumptions.  It may be difficult to believe, but funding is not vindication of your vision.  Only customers can answer the question whether the assumptions upon which you base your business are valid.   My suspicion is that many entrepreneurs would rather live a year or two off investor’s money than have customers tell them from the outset that the vision doesn’t cut the mustard. You must be willing to ask the question; you must be willing to hear no.

Understand where you are now and what your needs are.  Anyone who has ever been a project manager knows that the art of gathering requirements includes the fact that the customers don’t know what they don’t know.  In other words, there are possibilities for solutions to their problems beyond their understanding.  So it is not the role of project or product managers to be stenographers.   The key to understanding communication with customers is to understand what your current objectives are based on where you are within your chosen market.  My suspicion is that many businesses lose track of their own strategic objectives.

• what is your market type?
• what is your segment?
• what is the minimum feature set required to “kill the pain” enough that customers will pay?

To answer all three requires a combination of intuition and flexibility.

So this is the dance.  You must be open enough to ask the questions, listen well enough to ingest differences in opinion, confident in your instincts to reject some, flexible enough to alter your assumptions.

You might have to initially use concrete instead of slate, forget about color, and pave where the grass is worn, and not where your vision predicted.