Understand your customers so that you create something valuable

What do you bring with you into this phase?

Your starting point is the insight and the sketch that you used to secure support for the project.

Objective for the phase

The objective for this phase is greater insight into the customer’s needs and what problems are worth solving for the customer.

You have secured support from the management team, as well as the required time and resources. In order to ensure that the idea forms the basis for a product or a service that satisfies a need and creates value, you have to gather more insight. The best way to go about this is to involve those you want to develop the product/service for: Your customers.

4 steps

You now have to explore and understand in more detail what your customers perceive as obstacles and pain-ponts to achieving their goals, what their expectations are, and what they think of existing products and services. To do this, you have to conduct in-depth interviews that can be supplemented with other sources of insight.

You also have to determine as precisely as possible the actual needs and problems of the target group. It is not unusual to underestimate the importance of this work. Understanding the customer’s problems linked to the usage of products and services is fundamental to competitiveness and growth. Without this understanding, it is down to chance whether or not your solutions hit the mark.

Emne