How Customer Councils help you co-innovate with your customers?
We at TeamViewer are an innovative bunch. Innovation for us stems from keeping the customers at the center of all our product decisions. Staying true to that spirit, we kicked-off an initiative to have our customers play a more vital role in our product decisions. We call it the TeamViewer Customer Council.
Before I elaborate on what a customer council is, I would like to review upon a few lean software development practices.
Let's begin with the definition of MVP. Yes, once again for a millionth time. But there is an important reason to revise the definition of MVP because when a concept becomes hugely popular, it suffers the risk of losing its original meaning. And in my experience the term MVP has been subjected to misinterpretation and abuse.
The most common misinterpretation most product teams have about MVP is to think of it as the smallest increment of a feature that gets shipped to the customer.
That isn't true and that is why the actual definition of the MVP from the Lean Startup must be printed and pinned at a prominent location for everyone to see and remember.
A minimum viable product (MVP) is the "version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort“
Minimum means that you are focusing on how to learn with the smallest investment of time and resources
Now, I have a feeling that the reason most product teams fall back on their own convenient definition of MVP is because they do not have the tools and infrastructure to apply the Build, Measure, Learn cycle/iteration of product development. It is a lot of hard work to find the right kind of customers and share your iteration and learn and build and go back to them again. Hence, very few of them are able to practice iterative product development in its truest spirit. As a result, they try to imagine the perfect solutions on the drawing board by themselves without any customer input.
Customer Councils help make your customers partners and co-innovators in your product development process.
Customers are what make a product successful.
What is a Customer Council?
Customer Council is a community focused on getting early and continuous feedback from your customers to help improve our products.
Customer councils facilitate an ongoing conversation between customers and the product team.
It's an online community of 50-75 users who are carefully selected based on experience and expertise on a given feature area.
It is created when we plan to invest in substantial user research for areas that are difficult to understand, either because of the complexity of various workflows they involve, or because they support new market opportunities.
Participants in customer council are more invested in the process as they see their feedback reflected in design changes.
In return, product team members begin thinking in terms of concrete problems, real-world scenarios and begin to build customer empathy.
Shift in mindset with Customer Council
Instead of assuming that your ideas and intuitions are correct and embarking on product development
You will be actively trying to poke holes in your ideas, to prove yourself wrong, and to invalidate your ideas.
Every hypothesis you invalidate through conversations with prospective customers prevents you from wasting time building a product no one will buy.
Why Customer Council?
We are biased towards our own great ideas.
We feel that our industry knowledge entitles us to skip validating those ideas and jump to creating products.
Most new products fail. The odds are against you. 40% to 90% of new products fail to gain market adoption.
Most of our ideas don’t increase value for customers or companies – Microsoft estimates that only one-third of their ideas improve the metrics they are intended to improve.
Amazon tests every feature and fewer than 50% work.
It’s far faster and cheaper to catch your errors while you are still in thinking stage.
Once you are in prototype or product phase, correcting errors in your thinking is far more expensive.
How to prepare for a customer council?
Important to recruit carefully.
Product teams define a small set of targeted personas or profiles that are used to develop a screening survey.
A private custom site is created for each customer council. This is a place where members can talk with product team members as well as other council members.
Site hosts software downloads and other information for council activities.
How to make the best use of customer council?
Short surveys
Directed topics in online discussion forums
Webinars to introduce new features and take quick polls on first impressions
Small group discussion on particular topics
Structured usability sessions
One-on-one informal interviews
Other tips to manage customer council?
Contact customer council members as often as they are willing through a variety of means including discussion forums, quick surveys, and one-on-one conversations.
Mix informal methods and early concept testing with more traditional usability testing so that you don’t have to rely on product or prototype readiness to gather useful feedback.
Focus on specific features and workflows to ensure that you are evaluating real-world tasks in a realistic way.
When is a customer council considered successful?
Input is gathered early and often
Built features are evaluated in a realistic environment
Each feature is validated through real customer usage and feedback
Customers see the results of their design and testing feedback
Features are included in the release only when they meet defined targets
Some examples of Customer Councils in the industry
My first exposure to forming and managing Customer Councils was in Autodesk. Here is how the council looked for one of its product Autodesk Reality Capture. This is the introductory page on the Council forum
This is the page where the representative from the product teams share their bio. As you can see, pictures and bios are posted on customer council sites. Putting faces to names helps establish trust and collaboration with the participant customers.
Please let me know if you have formed customer councils in your organization.