A summary of “Build What Matters” by Ben Foster and Rajesh Nelikar — Part 3: Customer journey vision and product strategy

Thomas Ziegelbecker
12 min readDec 3, 2020

In the last part we left off at defining your Key customer outcome, or in short what’s the one thing you measure your progress to. But what’s the end-state? Where do you want to go with your product? That’s where your customer journey vision and later on your product strategy come into play!

Customer Journey Vision

Is…

“A future state, from your customer’s perspective” (Prodify)

From: https://www.prodify.group/blog/8-ways-to-express-a-product-vision

Defining a 10x customer outcome is the first step but to get there you also need to create the actual customer journey to yield it. That doesn’t mean you should provide a two-line vision as it won’t align people and leave too much room for interpretation.

Instead, the authors recommend clarifying the key elements of the product vision through the lens of the customer engaging with it, sufficiently describing all stages of the journey. Sufficiently to them means “your team is unified around an outline of a solution that is actionable and achievable”. This solution should contain enough detail to align across teams but not too much to avoid imposing a specific solution and limiting creativity. In their opinion, the actual solution should be discovered based on customer validation.

Tips they provide to formulate it

  • Write it down to provide a single source of truth, to align, and give everyone the chance to ask questions and to comment.
  • Be bold, be transformative. To get to an inspiring and “radical different solution” the authors list innovation days, competitor analysis focusing on weaknesses, finding applicable examples outside of your industry, or looking at customers and their behavior before and after they use your solution, as potential sources.
  • Determine your time horizon: the vision should be realistic and achievable within a certain time frame. By default, Ben and Rajesh suggest using 3 years. But to find the time frame suitable for your business reality they promote to consider factors such as company size, speed of market, and your financial runway. Another idea is to look for things where you are confident that the customer needs remain stable and use that timeframe. In general, they define the “right time frame” as the one that provides you with enough time to think creatively about a problem but not so much that the problem you are trying to solve changes in the middle of solving it.
  • Include all elements of the customer journey: by all elements, the authors mean to include all important decision points of your customers. For example, when they first recognize the opportunity for a better outcome to engage with your product. In this case, breath is more important than depth.

The main elements

While the main elements usually depend on your customer journey, Ben and Rajesh provide the following “minimum” elements in the book and on the website. They believe most of the time makes sense.

From: https://www.prodify.group/framework/customer-journey-vision

The main benefit of sketching these stages is to walk through each of them and the need to explain the thought processes of your customers when they go through them. Let’s briefly dive into each of these stages.

Trigger: when your customers look for a new solution to their problem. To expand the demand for your product you shape your users’ subsequent journey by building habits to control these triggers. For this, Ben and Rajesh ask questions such as:

  • “Was it an external (stimuli) or internal (powerful urges) trigger that caused customers to look for a solution?
  • “What’s their state of mind”
  • “What will make them realize their current solution isn’t good enough?”.

Discovery: when your customers find and associate your product with your solution. For example, if it’s noon and you are hungry what makes you immediately think of Sushi? Might be your body telling you that you need protein or an advertisement you saw the other day. “It’s about establishing the connection between their desired outcome and include it in your journey”.

Evaluation: following the discovery, customers evaluate whether they want to try your solution or instead move on trying another. Since the window of attention might be rather small, it’s important to make the case why your solution is worthwhile. The authors advocate to ask yourself:

  • “What in the product experience will be important and impact your customers to take the next step and try your product?”
  • “What are immediate objections they might have and how will you address them?

For example, TV manufacturers have found out that for TVs saturation plays an important role, what’s the equivalent to your customer journey?

Trial: After trying your product what will make your customers commit? The following questions will help you find that:

  • “What are the customer’s criteria to make the purchase and what boxes do you need to tick to win certain customers over?”
  • What’s the investment your customers have to put in?”
  • “How long does it take them to see results?”
  • “What are the risks for them to fail?”

Engagement: when the customer gets to know your product throughout everyday life. This stage is also often referred to as “adoption” or “activation”.

In that context Ben and Rajesh argue that “a one-time commitment is not enough” and they insist that every continued engagement (i.e., post-purchase) is critical to the customer and product’s long-term success. They believe that often customers aren’t aware of many features and the question arises how these customers learn more about them and the value they offer. Ask yourself “What behaviors drive activation/adoption and what are the key engagement behaviors in your product?”.

Retention: when and why customers might think of stop using your product? What are the drivers for customer loyalty? Are they getting the value they expect? Are they aware of the value they are getting? According to the authors, the last two questions are equally important, and only when they see the right indicators for success, they won’t wrongly abandon your product. And what will make the customer want to recommit and what events must be avoided to constitute a trigger event for switching to another product?

Ensure competitive differentiation

Neither ignoring nor solely focusing and matching your competitors is the right approach, it’s the right balance, Ben and Rajesh believe. They believe that you need to understand what they do and their product to have a clear answer to why a customer will choose your product over your competitor’s. The authors recommend using the Kano model to differentiate your features and their perceived value against your competitors and use cars as a product example to describe it.

From: https://www.prodify.group/blog/a-product-managers-guide-to-the-kano-model
  • Must-haves: A car can have the best engine, but people will only drive it if it comes with basic safety measures such as a seat belt. The authors point out that investing in them only makes sense as long as the satisfaction for them doesn’t plateau.
  • Performance features: Once the minimal requirements are met, your performance features are what allow you to overtake the competition. They are the ones customers have in mind when they evaluate your product. For example, for a car, these could be gas milage, reliability, or handing. The importance of each criterion depends on the customer and segment you want to build the car for. You know it’s a performance feature when investing scales still makes a difference.
  • Delighters: Features no customer expects but which they greatly appreciate as soon as they are using it. For example, a heated steering wheel for driving during winter times. These features set you apart from your competition and they are the things your customer is excited to talk about (i.e., word of mouth). Investing in these features usually scales exponentially.

While all Kano categories scale differently, they all degrade over time, since your competition catches up and through that change customer expectations. For example, a seat heating used to be a delighter for years, now it’s an expected part of the deal, at which point they have become a performance or even a must-have feature. A forward-thinking vision has to account for these evolutionary aspects!

Communicate your vision clearly.

According to Ben and Rajesh, only a properly articulated vision, one understood by the ones who need to execute it, is of true value. While lots of different formats are available the one selected should let you talk about the stages of the customer journey to reach the desired end-state. Keep in mind that lengthy documents aren’t likely to be read! Formats they suggest:

  • Comic strips: have the big advantage that they by definition require you to split it up into frames and force you to stay with the big picture and not go too much into detail. Speech bubbles allow communicating the most important decision points of the customer, while not going into details and showing a holistic customer journey. They ideally explain how customers feel along the way, what the obstacles are that they need to overcome, and why she/he would adopt your product.
  • Vision mock-ups: a visual representation of what the product could look like. They usually aren’t too detailed but spark debates and discussions to gather feedback. The authors compare them to concept cars of car manufacturers. They aren’t the result but are there to gather feedback and point you in the right direction.
  • Customer diary entries: Similarly, to comic strips, writing a diary entry will put you in your customer’s shoes and give you the chance to describe their thoughts and feelings while they interact with your product in greater detail. Doing this will get you in the customer outcome mindset and avoid only thinking about business outcomes.
  • Additional components: The authors also mention Personas: e.g., buyer persona and Design Principles: guiding principles and beliefs. E.g. “versatility” of a swiss army knife. But be aware that doing more of one principle could conflict with others. E.g., adding more gadgets to the knife might conflict with the knife being handy. So, principles create the constraints governing your product decisions so one doesn’t lose sight of qualities that are important to the customer journey.

Product Strategy

A lovely quote made at the beginning of the book:

Plans are worthless, but planning is everything (Dwight Eisenhower)

The authors see a “strategic plan” as something to get from A (today) to B (your end-state vision of the customer experience). Such a plan, which is a constant subject to change, “ensures that ongoing efforts are purposeful.

At this point, I like to note that purpose is the important word here because people don’t get excited about steps, tasks, or however you want to call it. They get excited because purpose lets people see and understand the potential meaning of their work! The most important thing is — you hypothesize, you test, you learn, and ultimately you adjust! Most importantly, adjustment isn’t “…a sign you are doing something wrong; it’s a sign you are doing it right!”.

Working backward

The authors provide two good examples explaining the idea:

  • First, one from WW2, where allied forces envisioned to overthrow Hitler and for that planned all their attacks and actions backward. They started imaging the day they entered Berlin and then by iteratively asking themselves “What would we have needed to do to get there?” went back time step by step. Meaning from the day they entered Berlin to the day they prepared the Normandy landing.
  • Second, they explained the process of crossing the river, where you would also first check all steppingstones and potential dead ends before actually stepping on them.

Gap Analysis

The mindset of working backward can then be applied to your customer journey vision. From the end-state in mind compare it to your current customer journey, which will reveal all necessary key improvements to deliver the 10x outcome. These gaps could be found in many directions such as product capabilities, missing data assets, user volume, brand awareness, or missing partnerships.

Sequencing your work

After you know the gaps, sequence your work to get from A to B, while addressing influencing product strategy factors such as business or technology constraints and dependencies. The authors list the following factors, which to them occur the most:

  • Navigating the financial situation and fundraising: In short, adjust your sequences and your milestones to your financial runway otherwise you will run out of cash.
  • Acquiring and extending a competitive advantage: This taps into the previously explained Kano model and how to look at it strategically. Ben and Rajesh suggest to not build performance features or delighters before you tick marked all must-haves, since “they earn you the right to play”. For example, think of Tesla who build a free supercharger network first, even though their car already had superior capabilities when compared to others. After this “earn the right to win” by including all performance features that customers in your targeted segments consider as key criteria when purchasing your product. But don’t try to satisfy “all customers”. And finally, “earn the right to win again”, which means include delighters that will drive your user’s engagement, retention, and that makes them come back again. They generate product evangelists, which is why it’s important to include them already in your MVP.
  • Serializing Market Segments: Start with one type of customer a time. The author’s name means such as by vertical, by customer size and sophistication, or by use case to find the market segmentation you want to tackle first.
  • Serializing Outcome delivery: serializing value related to the same overarching outcome for the same target market, adding layer after layer to increase the value proposition. Examples in the book span from Amazon’s Prime offer that now goes beyond free delivery or Peleton that now goes beyond spinning classes. In essence, use the buy-in of previous products for subsequent ones (i.e., going from a single to a multi-product platform).
  • Resolving Technology and Data Dependencies: To support your future customer journey vision. The book provides the example of LinkedIn who started as a social media platform, while these features were most likely only introduced to generate enough data that they then feed into their recruitment tools. Others now have a hard time competing with LinkedIn because they don’t have this vast amount of data which became an asset.
  • Creating Strategic Leverage: Think beyond data assets. For example, think of the first AT&T and Apple partnership to sell the first iPhone. The book tells you to also consider non-product advantages, such as business relationships, well-known reference customers, thought leadership positioning, SEO dominance on keywords, or brand equity. All of these advantages can be leveraged to maintain the number one spot in your segment / the new category you created.

Establishing Milestones

Most plans can be broken down to 3–5 milestones, providing you with fixed times where you can step back, reassess your strategy, and adjust. The adjustment could be needed due to the bigger market or economical changes before moving on into the next phase. During your assessment, the authors recommend using their outcome pyramid to measure progress and to share updates with executives including development accomplishments, results and learnings, next steps according to the plan, and adjustments you will make.

Finally, A case study of “Huddle” provides a good summary of all the steps mentioned. After Huddle started, they struggled to decide whether an idea fits with the overall vision or not. They tackled it the following way:

  • Breaking the key outcome down and having it as a north star they could come back to at all times.
  • Mapping out a customer journey and which parts need to be improved
  • Each part is built on top of the other.
  • Prioritization by target audience and use cases to decide where to focus
  • Near term roadmap connected to long term vision with defined product success metrics that helped to answer the question of when the product can scale
  • Plenty of iterative rework

Conclusions

I really like this part because it sequentially explains you what you could and should think of when coming up with both the end-state customer journey vision and your product strategy to get there.

Stay tuned for the last part of the book which is about “bringing the vision led product management to your company” or read the previous part 2 about Key customer outcomes.

Further readings from the authors:

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Thomas Ziegelbecker

Hi, I’m a Product Management enthusiast at Dynatrace, a dad, a husband, and an idealist who believes that we can make the world a better place.