How Does Your Product Help Customers Achieve Their Goals?
I’ve spent a lot of time doing customer research in healthcare. One thing I’ve noticed is how often participants naturally talk about outcomes.
When I talk with a nurse, they’ll talk about the clinical outcome they’re trying to achieve for the patient. We all want the person receiving care to get better, go home, and get back to their life.
When I do research outside of healthcare, I don’t hear participants talk about outcomes. They’ll tell me about what they do and the equipment they use. But, I’ve found that I often have to keep asking questions to understand what they are ultimately trying to accomplish.
I think the same thing can happen with product teams. We get so close to the product that it can be easy to lose sight of what it actually does for the customer.
We know our product, how it works, and what its features do. But that’s different from understanding the outcome that matters to the person using it.
A customer usually isn’t trying to use our product. They’re trying to accomplish something, and our product helps them get there.
This can change how we think about improving a product or where we look for new opportunities.
Instead of starting with, “How can we make our product better?” we can start with, “What is our customer trying to accomplish?”
Then we can ask what makes that difficult, what gets in their way, and what a better outcome would look like.
I think healthcare has made me more aware of this because the word outcome is used so often. But every product has an outcome attached to it, whether the customer uses that word or not.
