How Do You Know You’re Building What Matters? The Engine Room #1
Welcome to The Engine Room, a place where we share tips, tactics and resources to help you build the right products and campaigns.
"How do you know you're building the right products and features for your customers?"
I'll give you a hint. If you're not doing continual research, involving customers early and often, you're already on the wrong path. A path that’s often expensive to move off later down the line.
The reality in many organisations is that products are built on shaky foundations. A ‘problem’ is identified, a business case is built and a project is signed off. But all too often, the problem here isn’t well defined, and so the project is already off to a rocky start. This leaves project teams silently wondering what they’re actually building, opening up the risk of checklist requirements gathering, superficial problem solving and an end product that doesn’t meet its loose objectives.
This isn’t to say that all critical questions about a product need to be answered upfront. That’s both impossible and impractical. But it is to say that without asking these difficult questions, we’re already off to a bad start:
Is this idea viable? Can it make or save us money
Is this idea feasible? Can we actually build, launch and maintain it at a price that’s viable.
Is this product desirable? Do our customers, or prospective customers, want this? Is someone else already doing a good job of meeting customer needs?
Without upfront design discovery and audience research, you risk building products and features that speak more to internal assumptions than the needs of your customers.
