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By Kirk Averett
By Kirk Averett
Understanding a customer's real intent is essential to successful product management.
A few years ago, we were trying to figure out what new products and features to launch, so we looked at our "voice of the customer" data points. Every month, hundreds of users on our website were searching for "SharePoint," a Microsoft product we did not yet offer. Our product feedback and voting system registered high interest in SharePoint as well. When we asked the Sales team, they reported that SharePoint was coming up on many calls and that we were possibly losing some deals because it was missing. The Support team confirmed that customers were asking about it. It seemed like we had our next big add-on.
We were wrong.
Microsoft was very happy to help us plan the launch. They gave us advice about features to expose and how to add value as a reseller. Microsoft provided ample technical expertise to aid our integration.
We launched hosted SharePoint with a simple freemium model and excitedly awaited a strong revenue stream like we had experienced with the launch of an earlier add-on. We watched as a small number of customers played with the free offering, doing almost nothing. A very small number of customers used the service enough to reach a paid tier.
What was going on?
The bigger context was that Microsoft's marketing team was heavily pushing SharePoint as the solution to many interesting problems. But our customers did not know that SharePoint is a platform that requires considerable configuration -- it does nothing out of the box. We had added some bells and whistles to make it easier to configure and manage, but the customer still needed to have an idea of what they wanted to do.
So, customers were hearing about SharePoint everywhere. It sounded exciting. They wanted to use it and asked about it on the website and when talking with our team. But I never got down to brass tacks: what exactly did the customer need SharePoint to do and how would they need help to accomplish their goal?
The answer was: customers just wanted to know it was available, but few had any specific plan to use it.
Learning from this mistake
After this experience, we asked a lot more questions before adding major items to our development plans. What was needed? Why? Who would use it? How were they solving the problem today? What would it take to change to a new solution? And many more questions. After enough questions, the picture becomes more apparent, and confidence grows. If there are a large number of potential customers, a survey can help confirm what we think we know.
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