The Hierarchy of Urgent Customer Needs
A simplifying exercise for product development
Hi all —
I had a 10pm realization this week.
I was deep in the product roadmap, trying to figure out which parts of the product to prioritize and how the entire product would come together.
If you’ve done this before, you know that this is a grueling exercise. There are so many different ways to think about a product roadmap and building a coherent product. And as I’ve written before, each feature you prioritize can be configured a thousand different ways which range from days to months to complete.
My 10pm realization helped me simplify our prioritization. It’s a way to look at the product from the customer’s eyes, focusing on what matters most to them.
The exercise: Force-ranking potential customers’ problems in your product space in terms of urgency. In other words, I asked myself: “When it comes to employee retention (our product space), what is THE most urgent problem our prospective customers have?” I came up with a list of 5 needs and ran them by our sales & CS leads.
Why urgency? Because urgency drives action. As a startup, you’re able to sell much more easily when your potential customers need to change. And as much as everyone likes to fool themselves into thinking otherwise, if a problem isn’t really urgent, nothing changes. Nobody in B2B builds a sustainable, fast-growing revenue engine off “nice-to-haves”. So, focus on urgency.
When you try this, remember: You’re looking to create your customers’ ranking of needs in your problem space, not when using your product. You want to ignore your product for a moment, and think from the customer’s vantage point.
If you can’t intuitively rank customers’ needs - or feel like you’re guessing - you probably haven’t gotten your hands dirty enough. Like many things, this exercise should be relatively easy once you’ve done the grueling work it takes to understand your customers’ context. I personally onboarded our first 350 customers 1-on-1 to get that context. (Hopefully you’re smarter than me and it will take less time & effort for you!)
Another warning: Don’t outsource your force-ranking based solely on your customers’ feature requests. These may give you indications of where customers’ needs are, but they are also likely to drive you towards advanced settings for super-users than game-changing features that help you dominate the market.
One last thought - this brought to mind Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (below) where the most urgent needs are at the bottom of the pyramid; higher-level needs are irrelevant until the base needs are satisfied. Think this way and start at the base of the pyramid, then earn your way up.
