OBJECTIVE
The key to moving the needle is to discover what makes customers truly passionate. The better you understand customers and their needs, the more likely you will be to develop a product that provides need-addressing utility and resonates at an emotional level. In order to understand customer emotions, you must zoom in on individual people, not traditional personas.
WHEN TO USE IT
When beginning to tackle a new problem or opportunity, many teams struggle with starting out too broadly, or even worse, do not understand their individual customers. By identifying the unique attributes and existing behaviors of your target customer, you’ll have a foundation for zooming in on the problem and the solution. Doing this will set you up for successful experiments.
Therefore, the customer zoom tool is the ideal starting point when beginning to explore a new problem or opportunity. It is also the perfect place for distilling learnings from customer interviews and interactions.
STEP BY STEP INSTRUCTIONS
1. Set the Scene (2 minutes)
Imagine you are standing in a crowded room where this customer is one of the many people in attendance. You must describe this single person to someone else, so that they can easily identify your customer in the crowd.
2. Brainstorm Attributes (10 minutes)
Brainstorm 5-10 specific attributes that make your customer unique compared to other people in the room. These are the attributes unique to the context of your proposed solution, not just demographics or adjectives.
3. Select Top 3 Attributes (5 minutes)
Review your lists of attributes and select the most unique top three. Again, imagine you are describing your perfect customer to someone else.
4. Brainstorm Behaviors (10 minutes)
Brainstorm 5-10 behaviors that your customer is doing which you could potentially observe. Remember to focus on the behaviors unique to your specific problem or opportunity, or that are indicators for your hypothesized pain points.
5. Select Top 3 Behaviors (5 minutes)
Review your lists of behaviors and select the most unique top three. Once again, imagine you are describing your perfect customer to someone else.
6. Zoom-In (5 minutes)
Now, you should be so focused on a specific customer that you can actually envision them, draw their picture (have fun), and give your customer a name. Going forward, you can now refer to your customer persona by their name.
7. Congrats!
You’re now ready to move on to the Problem Zoom Tool.
Access the Customer Zoom and Toolkit Now
Bookmark this page for easy access to the instructions, and check out this article for additional information about using the Customer Zoom Tool.