Excellent post on how sales teams should create new value for customers.
#musicmonday Fela Kuti – Trouble Sleep Yanga Wake AM
Companies are from Mars and consumers are from Venus
I’m in the process of pushing out version 2.0 for TrendPo Insights, a new product to the TrendPo family. While developing the potential list of features for V.2, the Henry Ford quote (above) kept popping up in my head….. I’m not sure whether he really said those exact words but, I digress. We often hear from many product managers, sales teams and executives that customers don’t really know what they want and its a company’s job to figure it out and let the market decide (validation).
Validation brings us to Steve’s quote here. Let figure out what we think the consumer wants and build it. Once they see it, they’ll know that exactly what they’ve wanted. Sounds like a good strategy if you’ve got Apple’s resources at your disposal. (Depending on what you’re building, there are cheap ways to validate like paper prototyping.)
It comes down to a company’s ability to speak the same language as the customer. This can be done multiple ways….I’m just highlighting two:
- Education- Give the customer the functional language to describe pain points (content marketing and thought leadership do a great job when done well.)
- Moccasins your customers– Walk a mile in your customers’ moccasins. It provides the experience and the understanding to empathize and comprehend customer needs.
A majority of the battle is understanding your customers. Once you’re speaking the same language as your customer, it opens the door to great better solutions for your market.
5 product design mistakes you need to avoid
“While the audience asked a ton of great questions, I was surprised by how many of both audience types approached me afterward to thank me for sharing (what I thought were) fairly basic mistakes that stand in the way of great product design.” Adhering to the basics and delivering a powerful solution is what differentiates an okay product from a great product.
Growning up
The older I get, the more I realize that life is extremely complicated. We decide how complicated we want our lives to be. For me, I’ve decided to simplify over the years.
Following the very similar design philosophy I use to build products, I’ve decided to simplify all parts of my life. Everything is going down to the “minimal viable product” necessary to work.
The best example I can use here is my phone. We’ve all been duped into thinking we need an app for everything. Based on a Nielsen study from 2012, the average US phone has 41 apps downloaded . That’s a lot of apps! I had over 60 apps downloaded on my phone. I’ve got it down to 15 and looking for more to cut.
When you simplify, you focus on what’s truly important. I hope to replicate my app deletion frenzy in other areas of my life….like my shoes. (Yes, I have a shoe problem)