If you wanted to launch a product in the past, you had to be an expert. In other words, only specialists could design and produce new things (and there’s logic to that).
However, that way of doing things is over. Let’s try to understand how digital capabilities changed things.
Forget the Product-centric Approach
Imagine you’re a company at the top of your industry. Your production teams are responsible for producing and improving products already on the market.
Meanwhile, your research and development team comes up with new products and innovative techniques.
After months of work in the lab, the R&D team invents a new system, and it’s revolutionary!
Once the prototype is finalized, your design department takes over, calculating the potential market size to ensure that a launch will be profitable.
The marketing team handles the packaging and decides how to position the product on the market.
You had the best experts working tirelessly at every step. Your product will be perfect!
Two years later, you launched that perfect product.
And all without ever being seen or used by a single actual user.
Of course, my example is exaggerated, but it’s also outdated. Don’t you think?
Once more, new digital players have transformed how these things are done over the last few decades. Their secret? The customer-centric approach, where businesses shift their focus away from their internal organization and stratified production processes to then redirect focus to customers.
The primary goal changes—now it’s about keeping the customer satisfied by offering products and services designed with their needs in mind.
Why is this so important?
Because now the market is fluid, the competition is intense, and ultra-demanding users have become used to products and services tailored specifically to their tastes.
So what if, instead of spending years developing the perfect product, you tried to understand your potential users’ desires?
Time to Play!
Let’s start right now! Picture yourself as a project developer.
You’ve worked at a large company for more than 10 years and have just been certified as a wellness coach. You can’t wait to start teaching your first classes. Admiring your motivation, your HR director offers you a room for your courses.
All right! But which course should I start with? Meditation 🧘 or yoga 🤸♀️?
The best way to decide is to understand what your users want. Let’s go!
Put Yourself in Your Users’ Shoes
The first step is to identify who your future customers are.
Of course, you had an idea in mind, but then you brought up the subject with your closest coworkers during lunch break.
That made you realize that your future users—your colleagues, in this case—are different. Now you’ll need to identify the various user profiles. That way, you can find out about the emotions that drive their actions, since emotional response tends to be the biggest factor in decision-making.
But how?
Start by making a list of questions and conducting individual interviews with different types of users. The idea is to understand their needs, constraints, and pain points that would prevent them from joining your wellness courses. This is known as qualitative analysis.
Gathering and analyzing their responses will enable you to quantify and rationalize their expectations, so you can create a questionnaire and expand your analysis to more users. There are many ways to collect quantitative data: online surveys, emails, handouts in the break room, etc.
Based on all this data, you'll have managed to identify three major types of customers. Creating personas (a list of imaginary characters representing a particular group or segment) will help you understand what drives them in their everyday lives.
Get Users (Truly) Involved
You’re seeing things more clearly now—you know who your target users are, what they like, and how to make them happy. So, the next step will be to prototype your two scenarios: meditation class 🧘 or yoga class 🤸♀️.
Proto-what? 🤓
In the agile approach, prototyping means giving life to your idea so you can learn from it. You create a model to visualize your concept so you can evaluate it and have potential users test it.
OK, but how does that apply to teaching a wellness course? 🤨
You haven’t fully thought out the details of your classes yet, but you want to test them out. So you create a prototype (meaning a basic version of your idea) to present to your first users. Here are a few best practices to implement when presenting your prototype to your first users:
Schedule two free classes in the same time frame to see which one is more popular (plus get feedback to improve it).
Hold a “meditation 🧘 vs. yoga 🤸♀️” contest or survey on the company’s intranet or your Instagram account.
Do a pre-test, or beta test, of both classes exclusively for your best customers before launching the new ones.
Ask them for their opinions (on the location, the class activities, etc.), whether online or in a suggestion box in the break room. The possibilities are endless! Bonus: In addition to collecting data, your approach will give your users value. You’ll reduce potential hesitations and roadblocks by involving them.
Finally, get them involved in co-creation—choosing music, class themes, and adapting content to their needs (e.g., pregnancy, getting ready for vacation).
Beta test? Yeah, you beta! 😝
In the tech world, a product’s beta version is tested before the product is marketed or released on a mass scale. Finally, it’s finished enough that it can be launched and tested by a small number of users.
Once you’ve established a relationship with your customers, keep nurturing it!
Your customers become your community. You provide them with guidance and motivate them. In return, they will support you in your projects.
Make your customers your best ambassadors by getting them to share their experiences online (testimonials, comments on the company intranet, Google reviews, social media posts).
When you start making money from your classes, you can start setting up sponsorships, reward programs, or exclusive promotions.
But how do you truly get to know all your customers when you have a large number of them with many different profiles?
That’s what you’ll find out in the next chapter, which is all about data!
Let’s Recap!
The customer-centric approach has transformed how products are designed, which means the primary focus of a business has shifted to keeping the customer satisfied.
The first step to implementing this approach is identifying and understanding your customers, especially what drives their decisions.
Once you’ve gotten to know your customers, you must continue to understand them better by asking them questions and involving them in different project stages.
Now that you know how to understand your customers by making them the center of your attention, learn how data can help you improve your decision-making.
