Shift from "Product First" to "Customer First"

Shout-out to my mentor Josie-Dee for thoughtfully putting this article together.

Shift from "Product First" to "Customer First": The focus of a product team should transition from being product-centric to truly understanding the needs and tasks of users. The term "product first" should be reconsidered, as it often leads to prioritizing business goals over genuine user needs. This involves moving away from the "feature factory" mindset and prioritizing discovery, research, and understanding before solution design. A customer-centric aka product-last approach requires a deep understanding of what users are trying to achieve and how they currently do it.

Action Plan:

• 🔍 Start with Understanding Your Users:

  • Invest in qualitative research to deeply understand user tasks, experiences, pain points, needs, habits. This approach ensures your eventual solutions are deeply rooted in user experiences that solve users’ problems, rather than business assumptions or cool tech.

  • Don’t start with product, features, ideas, or hypotheses - avoid solution or feature fixation early in the process. This helps avoid a narrow focus on features and ensures a broad exploration of potential improvements.

  • “Be solution-agnostic until we have enough evidence, data, and knowledge to consider what would best solve experience ecosystem problems and deliver value and quality.”

  • Define problem statements that frame your understanding of your users’ problem. Reference these throughout the process and refine with new information or tested assumptions.

• 📊 Determine & Measure True Outcomes:

  • Focus on metrics that reflect user success (e.g., efficiency, error reduction) which correlates directly with business success.

  • Consider how to measure how much improvement your product/service/experience can bring to your user’s tasks.

    • What were people trying to do? Were they trying to accomplish that task faster, more easily, cheaper, with greater accuracy or no errors, or without needing to contact Support for help? Did we facilitate that? Can we measure what we improved for users? Can we measure what we made worse?

    • Does the task take less time while also being less error-prone? Are users seeing increased efficiency or accuracy? Does this system work well for their tasks, habits, perspectives, decision-making, and styles? Are our target audiences complaining? Returning products or ending contracts?

• 🎯 Strategic Visioning & Tactical Planning:

  • Develop a comprehensive CX strategy that aligns with business goals while truly serving user needs and achieving meaningful outcomes for users. It can encompass not just digital or physical products/tech but also services, experiences, human interactions.

    • “Our strategic path to business success requires us to take the people in our experience ecosystem on a path to success.”

  • Estimate and plan resources and timelines for CX/UX tasks and tests, before jumping into solution development or involving engineering teams. Plan meticulously and leave time for prototype development, testing, and iteration, in order to minimize risk and waste before scoping and estimating engineering work.

• 🔄 Test & Refine Solutions; Continuously Improve:

  • Continuously test potential solutions against original problem statements to ensure they effectively address core issues without introducing new problems. This focus on rigorous testing and refinement promotes higher quality outcomes and can achieve faster product/market fit.

    • *Does it solve the original problem statement? Does it solve it well? Did it create any new problems? Is this the right execution of the right idea? Or do we need to go with a different execution… or a completely different idea or solution? Where is there room for improvement?

    • NOT: “do they like it,” “how do they feel about it,” “how often will they use it,” “what will they pay for it?”*

  • Emphasize strategy and planning (as separate activities), critical thinking, and first-principles approach to ensure solutions are effective, which can save time and resources in the long term.

    • “We work smarter, even if it takes a little longer. That time investment will pay off in value, quality, and saving us from having to clean up our own messes later.”

  • “The core of Agile is consistently delivering quality on a reproducible cadence. It’s about being efficient: balancing velocity with quality and successful outcomes.”