OpinionThinking like the customer: How understanding users shapes the product
Opinion
Thinking like the customer: How understanding users shapes the product
"An excellent product is the result of ongoing collaboration and synchronization across all aspects of the business," writes Itzik Elbaz, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Artlist.
To create the best product in the market, employees must have a clear understanding of why they do what they do. What is the company’s vision? Who are the users? And how can I, as an employee, enhance the user experience? When an organization is in its early stages and the team is relatively small, these questions seem self-evident. But how do you maintain this clarity when the organization grows to 100 or even 500 employees or more?
Product development and evolution are greatly influenced by the company’s culture, vision, and core values. When teams within the company feel connected to its central goals, they are more driven, engaged, and creative. That’s why I make time to meet with every new employee as part of the onboarding process to discuss our company values and approach.
Understanding the company’s culture instills a sense of purpose and direction among employees. It provides them with a roadmap that helps guide their decisions, aligning them with the company’s overarching goals. This alignment not only enhances the product development process but also fosters a positive and empowering work environment where creativity thrives.
Understanding the competition
To create a product that stands out in the market, it’s essential to have a full understanding of competing companies. Gaining insights into the vision and cultures of similar companies can offer valuable perspectives on the strategies and areas they focus on. This knowledge helps identify your company’s unique advantage and highlight areas where the user experience can be improved. By using competitor analysis to map out industry standards, you can establish benchmarks and refine your unique value proposition. This understanding also positions your business to develop the best product for the user. When launching a new product, subscription plan, or feature, I work closely with my teams to conduct in-depth competitor analysis and delve into our value proposition.
Understanding the users
To deepen the understanding of the user, I’ve found that putting yourself in the customer’s shoes is one of the most important ways to guide product development. It’s crucial to look at the user and their experience from all angles: their needs, pain points, and workflows. By doing so, products can be tailored to provide real solutions and even exceed customer expectations. There isn’t a day that goes by where I don’t review user feedback, and I ensure that this culture of user focus is ingrained in the company. Surveys and sentiment analysis allow businesses to collect feedback directly from their customers, enabling them to gauge customer satisfaction and identify areas for improvement.
Customer service interactions are also a valuable source of information. Analyzing customer service data can reveal recurring issues and pain points that users experience. This information allows proactive action to address problems and build stronger customer loyalty.
A/B testing is another powerful tool that helps compare different versions of a product to determine which best suits users. Through A/B tests, data-driven decisions can be made to refine products according to user preferences.
Direct involvement of all employees with users and collecting real-time feedback ensures that users, and the best product, remain at the center of all decisions. A customer-driven approach fosters trust and loyalty.
Becoming the customer
Every new employee who joins our company is required to complete an exercise where they use the product to create some form of content. To fully understand the product, employees must not only think like customers but also become them.
By using the product as customers do, teams gain firsthand insights into functionality, flow, and the user experience. This exercise allows employees to identify potential bottlenecks, enhance the product to improve the user experience, and understand which features are most useful, how to market the product, and much more.
In the end, an excellent product is the result of ongoing collaboration and synchronization across all aspects of the business. The stronger the connection between the organization, the product, and the users (and not just in that order), the better the experience we can ensure for our customers.
The author is Itzik Elbaz, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Artlist.
