Customer

The transformation of support functions from mere cost centers to strategic partners requires a fundamental shift in perspective. Moving beyond a myopic focus on cost efficiency, these functions need to adopt a forward-looking stance. Embracing a customer-centric approach is paramount — support functions must treat internal colleagues as customers. In this way, they foster innovation, facilitate timely resource allocation, and collaborate with revenue-generating units to optimize desired business outcomes. By embracing innovation, nurturing collaboration, and aligning with strategic objectives, support functions can shed the cloak of the traditional “cost center” image and emerge as essential catalysts for organizational success in the digital era.

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Value streams are all the activities an organization does to create value for customers and other stakeholders (usually within a specific product). “Lean” practitioners help you map your workflows, so you can see how to improve them while maintaining value creation. But what if the value isn’t there? Or you’re creating a new product? Or “innovating?”

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The Value Stream Discovery Loop is a customer-centric approach to value creation. It helps businesses understand what their customers need and how they can provide value to them in an efficient, value-enhancing way. At its core, this is accomplished by looking at a customer’s lifecycle journey from their perspective.

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Tracing the origin and evolution of Product management to understand how we got here and what's next to continue to drve business impact.

People often aren’t conscious of their needs or how to address them. This explains why we buy a lot of things we don’t need. Because of this, if one wants to create value in the world, it’s up to product managers to understand needs. In other words, they shouldn’t be asking customers what they want or asking them to predict how they might behave in the future. 

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Product Management has been a discipline in the business world for several decades. However, it has become increasingly important with the acceleration of digital transformation in large businesses. As organizations continue to adapt to advancements in technology, and increasingly incorporate digital solutions into their products, Product Management will be a critical part of product success and innovation. Product Management will help organizations understand what their customers need and create new products and services that meet those needs for both the short and long term. The Product Management function leads the way in the human side of digital transformation.

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Opportunity discovery is the practice of figuring out where a business can find new growth. It’s the phase that comes before customer discovery and before product idea. (You can actually start with either of those, but should take a big stop backward to figure out more about the actual opportunity.)

There are 4 parts to opportunity discovery. In this episode, we'll be going over these 4 parts and the process of finding said opportunities.

Wars, technological advances, the pandemic, social, and political turmoil have led to businesses facing disruption on an ongoing basis. As technology innovation has moved to the edge, technical risk is less problematic than market risk. The risk to business is less “can we build the product” than “should we?” Customer insights represent an important and vastly under-appreciated intellectual capital versus, say, patents. Businesses must be closer to the customer; understand them deeper. They must be able to respond to change. Overall, companies must be nimble and move fast.

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Disruption is happening, and we can’t stop it—it's part of the shift from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age. We can, however, learn and adapt in order to survive and thrive. We can do this by thinking like entrepreneurs, in other words, learning before executing. To behave in this way, however, requires new leadership skills and benefits from alternative organizational structure.

Steve Portigal, Author, Speaker, and Customer Research Expert, shares how to drive innovation using the power of strategic customer insights. He reminds us that learning from customers is “messy” because we are complex beings. In order to go deep while interviewing customers you should have clarity about what is uncomfortable for you and what is uncomfortable for customers and not conflate the two. His provocation “No One Cares” highlights the risk of magnifying the significance of our solutions in a customer’s life and missing the opportunity to focus on things that customers care about.

Katie Hanson, Director of Product Management at Benefitfocus, shares how her company quickly adapted to help their customers find affordable benefits during this global pandemic and how it led to the creation of a new offering. She also talks about the importance of supporting her team during these stressful times by understanding how they are “really” doing.

Bennett Blank, Innovation & Transformation Leader at Intuit shares his observations on the creativity of small businesses during hard times and the grass-roots activation of Innovation tools at Intuit to help small businesses get through this pandemic.