Outcome-centered product design flywheel
How customer behaviors make for better product improvement metrics
Achieving desired business results is fundamental to success. Pursuing these results through product enhancement involves executing strategies tied to executable business objectives, such as increasing revenue within a timeframe.
Human-centered design is a problem-solving approach that achieves desired business results by changing specific human behaviors. It achieves this by improving human experiences and addressing unmet needs, drawing insights from existing customer behaviors and values. Measuring outcomes vs. outputs provides unique benefits; ensuring features are valuable, changing customer behavior, and driving business results.
Below are activity steps that leverage customer behaviors as a unifying metric. Understanding and leveraging behaviors provide a unique context for predicting future success. Moreover, creating and testing concepts at the design phase affords early empirical insights into what users prefer, want, and need and what drives business impacts. Validating learning before you build saves the team considerable time and costly pivots.
Understanding customer needs mitigates risk
When crafting a successful product, Steve Jobs shared his wisdom: “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around.” Amazon’s method of “working backward” mitigates risk by first defining the destination. The secret to Apple’s and Amazon’s success begins with uncovering what customers are experiencing, challenged by, and seek to address their unmet needs. These insights guide the path toward creating concepts and solutions that increase satisfaction, adoption, and ultimately sustained business growth and success.
How: Observe current work processes and behaviors, research user experiences, and capture user preferences and values. Document insights in the form of current work patterns, user personas, behaviors, and a summary of existing challenges and unmet needs. These insight are vital to informing improvement strategies that cause customers to change their behavior.
Testing and validating solutions early and often accelerates market fit
Validating solutions in the early design stages accelerates the overall journey toward market fit. Design-led iteration, testing, and measuring mitigate risk by leveraging real user insights to gain learning early in the process – fail faster and notably cheaper. Studies suggest that design-driven iteration is ten times more cost-effective than making changes post-development and forty times more cost-effective post-launch.
How: Craft experiments aimed at enhancing current behaviors, adding value to customers’ lives, and impacting business results. This phase yields artifacts such as concepts, flows, models, and prototypes to test with stakeholders and users.
Data-informed decision-making counteracts harmful assumptions and opinions
Measuring experiments helps refine user experiences and ensures product development decisions are rooted in empirical evidence, eliminating guesswork and missteps. Capturing user insights de-risks your efforts by surfacing what your customers find valuable.
How: Test and measure experiments with users to ascertain if the proposed solution drives behavior change, adds value, and impacts business results. Outputs include artifacts designed to test behaviors and elicit feedback that further informs or validates design recommendations.
Building a proven solution frees up time to focus on quality and accelerates market fit
Building validated solutions mitigates churn and accelerates development. Because the solution is already proven right, development is unburdened with figuring out if it’s the right feature and focuses on building the feature right.
How: The process involves developing functionality, features, and experiences guided by user-validated learnings and recommendations validated to change behavior that drives business results.
Output: Produced, tested, and launched feature that users value.
Quantifying customer behaviors and business results
Quantifying new customer behaviors and business results offers useful performance feedback. These insights into product success factors illustrate performance success and add insight into areas for improvement moving forward.
How: Establish means for gathering key performance metrics post-launch, such as changes in customer behaviors and subsequent business results. The resulting tracking data tracking presents a change in performance.
Overall, focusing on outcomes reduces churn, increases predictability, and focuses on quality user experiences that change behavior that drives business impact.