At the end of the day, the job of a product manager is rather simple: Create product experiences your users love.
Of course, a lot goes into that. But no matter how busy the day gets, the best PMs can always spot the forest through the trees. They can tie everything on their to-do list back to the ultimate concern—the user. That’s the key to building customer-centric product experiences.
These eight golden rules for building customer-centric product experiences provide a framework for understanding exactly what drives your users — because you know exactly what motivates users, you can design products that fully meet their needs.
The importance of a customer-centric strategy in product development
The golden rules of a customer-centric strategy outline how to center users in every step of your product development cycle. Your users are the ones most directly impacted by your product’s features and functions. If you involve them in the development cycle from start to finish, they’re more likely to be happy with the end result.
A customer-centric product approach boosts loyalty and overall sales, and it also prevents your organization from constantly going back to the drawing board, saving your organization time and resources. Plus, with products that function according to user preferences, you’ll worry less about needing major overhauls along the way.
Understanding — and meeting — customer needs
Customer-focused product development starts with pinpointing the reason users flock to your product. It involves a mix of demographic data and specific user behaviors, leveraging both to develop a comprehensive strategy for enhancing the user experience.
Obtaining this kind of holistic data takes a multi-pronged approach. Targeted surveys and interviews are important ways of engaging with customers to understand why they do what they do. Of course, user feedback doesn’t always paint the full picture. Tracking user behavior offers even greater insight into user flows and pain points.
While your user base should be the first priority in product development, it’s also important to understand the landscape beyond your target customers. Market research is an essential part of determining demand for your product and the best strategies for releasing it.
With so many areas to cover, the golden rules provide a checklist for covering your bases.
Rule #1: Build benefits and solutions, not just features
Before you get into the nitty-gritty details, you must ensure that your user’s needs are the foundation of your development process.
You’ve probably heard the old saying, “People buy solutions, not products.” It’s not a saying for nothing: According to a survey by Demand Gen Report, 97% of B2B buyers say feeling like their needs are understood is an important factor when making buying decisions.
So, we can surmise that buyers (particularly B2B ones) don’t necessarily purchase and stay with the flashiest product or the longest list of features. Buyers choose products that help them solve their problems quickly, easily, and thoroughly.
What does that mean for product teams? Design benefits and solutions, not just features. Try describing your product’s core offerings in terms of its benefits rather than its features. Instead of describing your product as fast, for example, position it as a time-saver.
Spinning a feature to sound like a solution isn’t hard. The real challenge is to ensure the solutions you build answer actual problems in the market.
That’s why user research is such a valuable asset to product people. User interviews, product analytics, in-product surveys, talking to sales and customer service teams—all of these user research methods help you understand your customers and identify the problems that keep them up at night. Only then are you poised to shift into problem-solving mode and develop useful, valuable products.
Turn to Google Glass as an example. When product teams build features that don’t answer a market need, they’re on a slippery slope toward building a product that—no matter how cool and cutting-edge—doesn’t give their customers a reason to buy. That’s what happened with Google Glass.
When Google released its smart eyewear in 2014, the company banked on name recognition and hype to sell it. You could take hands-free photos and read from the internet on the lenses, but it ultimately flopped because it didn’t provide any clear value to a specified end-user.
Years later, Google released the Glass Enterprise Edition. This time, they built and marketed the product as a solution for manufacturing, logistics, and field services. An employee on the factory floor, for example, can wear the glasses to see diagrams, instructions, and other useful information while their hands are occupied. They even built this new model to be more durable than the original and more lightweight than competitor wearables.
Once they defined their end-user and built to provide value, Glass Enterprise became a smashing success until its discontinuation in 2023.
Rule #2: Customer value drives product prioritization
If you’re like most PMs, you aren’t short on ideas to improve your product. The challenge isn’t dreaming up ideas to make your product better—it’s picking which idea to spend time on first.
The ability to prioritize objectives is among the most important skills in product management. PMs must be able to consider business goals, conflicting customer input, pressure from higher-ups, their team’s limited bandwidth, and their own customer knowledge to determine the best use of time and resources.
For customer-centric product managers, that means measuring everything in your development queue against customer needs. What product features would help your users solve a new problem? What enhancements will make your product experience faster and easier to use?
There are several ways to approach prioritization, some more prescriptive than others. Three models stand out as highly customer-centric approaches:
- The value vs. effort model maps every proposed development project onto a matrix to give you a visual cost/benefit analysis. It helps you see which projects will add the most value to your product with the lowest amount of effort.
- The Kano model is a more complex alternative to the value vs. effort model. It separates potential projects into one of five categories (Basic, Performance, Delighter, Reversal, and Indifferent features) to help you understand how to maximize customer satisfaction at the lowest cost possible.
- The buy-a-feature framework involves playing a game to help you understand which features your users consider most valuable. To play, price every proposed product update based on the amount of time and effort it would take to build. Then, give your users a limited budget and ask them to spend it on the features they’d most like to see. Where they choose to spend their dollars can tell you a lot about what they value in your product.
Prioritization is a make-or-break responsibility. It’s your biggest opportunity to (re)direct your team’s design and engineering efforts into projects that will give value to your customers. In other words, it’s when a customer-centric strategy starts to materialize as a customer-centric product experience.
Rule #3: A seamless user experience will keep customers coming back
According to Forrester, every dollar you invest in user experience (UX) sees 100 dollars in return. It’s one of the best ways a product team can attract, convert, and retain customers.
UX design goes beyond prettying up your product. For B2B in particular, great UX is all about helping customers complete objectives faster and more smoothly. It removes barriers between your users and the essential solution(s) your product promises to provide.
3 strategies for enhancing UX
- Create a user experience map to nail down the user journey. User experience maps layout the path a user is meant to take to achieve a goal within the app. Creating one can help you build a product experience with a seamless beginning, middle, and end—not just a collection of disconnected features.
- Conduct user testing to watch how people use your product. A user experience map can show you how users are supposed to move through your product. But there’s only one way to see what users actually do with the product: by watching them try. With user testing, you can get valuable insight into where your users get confused and frustrated within your product.
- Launch contextual in-product surveys to hear straight from your customers. In-product surveys allow you to catch users while they’re immersed in the product experience. Because they have an up-close and real-time perspective on your UX, they can share precise feedback, describe specific pain points, and give you insight into their needs and behavior. With Sprig, you’ll have the ability to trigger surveys based on specific user flows, so you know exactly what action they took before submitting feedback.
Imagine your product is a highway that takes your users from problem to solution. In that case, refining your UX is like fixing potholes and installing traffic signs—anything to make the drive as effortless as possible.
Rule #4: Implement continuous feedback loops
Recording user feedback through every stage of the product experience is vital to getting the full picture. A continuous feedback loop helps you track feedback from the product launch to the next product update. With constant feedback, you can see what issues need to be fixed — and ensure the remedies you’ve implemented were actually effective in solving your user’s problem.
Tools such as Sprig Feedback help you both capture and analyze constant user feedback. Sprig Feedback identifies bugs and tracks customer satisfaction metrics such as CSAT and NPS scores. This feature then analyzes all of this data to give you AI-powered insights into how to improve your product and your overall customer experience strategy.
Rule #5: Foster cross-functional collaboration
When it comes to effective collaboration, silos don’t benefit anyone. From engineering to design, multiple teams bring a product to life. Those helpful user feedback insights need to be communicated across the board to every team that has a hand in designing the product.
A strong cross-functional collaboration process sets everyone up for success, defining procedures that ensure nothing slips through the cracks. Ideally, you’ll have a frequent meeting schedule, while allowing for flexibility so organic teamwork can happen when inspiration strikes.
Rule #6: Make data-driven decisions
Analytic tools are important for identifying any trends in the feedback data you’ve collected. Are most users experiencing the same frustration with a particular feature? Do many users drop off at the same point on your website? Does your product offer a solution that users rave about? A data-driven approach helps you answer these questions accurately so you can focus on the right things in the development process.
Reviewing this data manually can be cumbersome, so utilizing machine learning is key to expediting product development. Sprig AI Analysis automates product learning in real-time, pinpointing strengths and weaknesses and suggesting opportunities for improvement. This helps you draw the fastest, most direct route to success on your product roadmap.
Rule #7: Stay ahead of market trends
Whether it's streamlined design or technological innovation, your users expect the latest and greatest product offerings. Keeping up to date with industry trends helps you deliver what users are seeking.
There are multiple ways to stay abreast of what’s new in your market. Read trade publications and expert blogs to keep your finger on the pulse of new breakthroughs that might benefit your product offerings. Meeting face-to-face with other product professionals through networking events and conferences can also give you a leg up on what’s around the corner.
While keeping track of industry trends is a must, it’s important to be discerning in which trends belong in your product development strategy. After all, trends can be fleeting. If a particular trend seems relevant to your target market, integrate it into your roadmap in small ways. Apply your data-driven philosophy and test the new innovation with a segment of your user base, so you can see if it’s a trend worth following.
Rule #8: Ensure scalability and flexibility
As your user base grows, your products must be able to adapt and meet their fluctuating needs. Designing products with scalability in mind ensures a smooth process for product developers and users alike. Whether it’s being ready to meet an uptick in user traffic, an increase in data, or fulfilling new user requests, flexibility is pivotal to product success.
Being flexible means embracing the fact that you may not always know what lies in front of you — but you can stay one step ahead with the right planning and preparation. When creating your product roadmap, establish an estimated timeline for user growth. Define KPIs for product success at the onset of the development cycle, so you know whether you’re ready to scale further. If a product isn’t meeting predefined quality standards, those need to be addressed before you can expand.
The tools you use to build your product must also be equipped to handle growth, so make sure you’ve got a tech stack that can handle the job. This may include the ability to customize product features to meet your target user’s unique needs.
Just like with customer feedback, scalability is a continuous process. Track performance and progress through every stage of scaling so you know you’re on the right track. If issues arise, having the right tools in place can help you spot problems while they’re still small enough to fix, so they don’t impact your efforts to keep growing.
Examples of successful customer-centric products
If you’re skeptical about the benefits of a customer-centric approach, look to the many success stories of companies that prioritize a user-first philosophy. For instance, popular project management software platform Asana centers the Voice of Customer (VoC) in their product roadmap strategy.
Before implementing any new features to product updates, their team uses a five-step process — listening, understanding, delivering, acting, and responding — that ensures updates are driven by user feedback. With over 139,000 paying users and counting, it appears that Asana’s customers can see the value.
Other companies use a customer-centric approach to drive their entire business model. Beauty and fashion businesses such as Stitch Fix and Prose hair care use customer feedback to provide fully customized product offerings. Users answer questions about their style preferences or hair type and receive tailored product recommendations that meet their exact needs.
Challenges and solutions in building customer-centric products
Taking a customer-centric approach will streamline product development significantly, but that doesn’t mean it’s without challenges. These are some of the most common roadblocks teams run into — and how they solve them.
- Getting different teams on the same page. If users are offering feedback about product design, but that insight isn’t getting shared with your design team, you can’t expect them to make the right improvements. Prioritize a cross-functional approach to product design so everyone is aligned from beginning to end.
- Balancing a range of customer needs. Not every user will like or dislike the same product features. Learning how to prioritize competing needs is essential to efficient product development. Consider segmenting users with the same feedback and needs into groups to keep things organized. These segments can be especially helpful for testing new features if that group has been vocal about requesting an update or bug fix.
- Knowing when to implement user feedback. Applying user feedback to your product development cycle is essential, but it’s important to get the timing right. You don’t want to create bottlenecks elsewhere that end up causing additional user frustration. If you take an agile planning approach, sprint planning sessions are often ideal for figuring out where to fit user feedback and analytic data into the product development puzzle.
Building customer-centric product experiences is a journey, not a destination
Customer-centricity isn’t a one-time fling — it’s a long-term commitment. With that in mind, don’t think of these rules as items to check off a to-do list. Think of them as customer-centric mantras; reminders to always keep the customer in mind as you build and rebuild.
These days, product management hinges on iteration. Once you’ve shipped a product, most of your job is to listen, empathize, and take incremental steps to add user value bit by bit. Just like a relationship, it’s the little things that count.
Sprig’s tools can help you gain product insights that offer tangible opportunities for action and improvement. Get meaningful feedback directly from your users, and let Sprig aggregate and analyze that data for relevant information and trends. Schedule a demo to see how Sprig can help you put your users at the center of your products.