 Hello everyone. Thank you for joining today for this product management talk. I'm Chitra Chakraborty. I'm a PM lead at Microsoft and today I'm going to talk about identifying user needs for product development. So let's get started. So this is what we are going to cover today. First, we will know why being customer centric is so important. Second, we will see how to go about understanding your customers. And third, we will go through an approach to prioritize the right problems to solve. Finally, we will touch upon a little bit upon the problem solving approach as well. Why customer centricity is important at the first place. First of all, definition of the customer centricity. We customer centric means that a business places the customer at the center of everything it does. It's a strategy that prioritizes understanding the customer's needs, wants and preferences and tailoring products and services and experiences accordingly. A customer centric business is focused on building long term relationships with its customers by delivering value and meeting their expectations in every touch point. Now, why putting customers first is so important. There are several reasons why being customer centric is important for businesses. Firstly, it helps with building customer loyalty, which can lead to repeat business and positive word of mouth recommendations. Secondly, it helps businesses to stay competitive by differentiating themselves from other companies that may not be prioritizing the customer experience. Thirdly, it can help to identify areas for improvement and innovation as customers are often the best source of feedback and new ideas. Finally, a customer centric approach can lead to increased revenue and profitability. As the happy customers are the most likely to spend more and more and stay loyal with the company over time. Adding some facts over here, according to a study by Deloitte, the customer centric companies are 60% more profitable than the companies that are not focused on the customer. Giving some examples from the industry. Number one, Starbucks. Starbucks is well known for its customer centric approach to businesses. An example of this company's mobile app, which allows users to order and pay for their drinks in advance, saving time and streamlining the ordering process. The app allows users to customize their orders and save their favorite drinks for easy reordering for the next time. It helps the Starbucks to stay competitive by differentiating themselves from other companies in this market. The second one is Zappos. Zappos is an online shoe and clothing retailer. It's famous for its customer service. The company has a vow of philosophy, which means that it aims to provide easy customer, every customer with an exceptional experience that goes above and beyond the expectations. Zappos offer free shipping and returns, a 365-day written policy and 24-7 customer service hotline, which is staffed by friendly and knowledgeable representatives who are empowered to make the decisions and solve the problems for the users on the spot. The next one is Walt Disney. Walt Disney is known for its dedication for creating magical and memorable experience for its guests, as we know, as we all know. The company places strong emphasis on customer service. The team of cast members who are trained to go above and beyond to create a positive experience for all the guests that those visit them. Disney also invest heavily in the R&D to create new attractions and experiences that appeal to its new customers, keeping them coming back again and again to them. In all of these three companies, the customer service is a customer experience is something that is prioritized. They invest in creating memorable and personalized experiences for their customers. By doing so, they have been able to build strong brand loyalty and create a competitive advantage in their respective industries. So how do you go about understanding your customers? In order to build a successful product, it's crucial to understand your customers. In this slide, we will discuss three key ways to gain a deeper understanding of your customers. One is identify your target audience. Two, create customer personas. And the third one is by conducting customer service and interviews. The first step is to identify your target audience. Who are the people who will benefit the most from your product or service? What are their pain points, goals, and preferences? To answer all of these questions, you can analyze your existing customer data, conduct market research, and consult with your sales and marketing teams. Once you have identified your target audience, the next step is to create customer personas. A customer persona is a detailed profile of your ideal customer. Based on research and insights, you can create customer personas to better understand the needs and motivations of different customer segments and tailor your product development strategies according to that. Finally, conducting customer service and interviews. You can provide valuable feedback and insights from your target audience. This feedback can help you identify areas for improvement in your product or service as well as uncover new opportunities and trends in your market. Overall, understanding your customer is essential to building a successful product. For identifying your target audience, creating customer personas and conducting customer service and interviews. You can gain valuable insights into the needs and preferences of your customers and use that information to create products that truly meet their needs. It's important to define your target audience. In this slide, we will discuss three key steps to help you define your target audience. The first step is to conduct research and gather analytics data. This may involve analyzing your existing customer data, conducting market research and consulting with your sales and marketing teams. You could also look at our social media and Google analytics insights to get this information. By gathering this information, you can gain a better understanding of your customers' demographics, behaviors and preferences. The second step is to identify patterns and commonalities among your target audience. This may involve looking for similarities in age, gender, income, location or other relevant factors. By identifying patterns, you can create more accurate and detailed profiles of your target audiences. You can segment the users based on any of these factors. For example, by age, you could segment the users as children, young adults, elders or you could segment them as different generations, gen Zs, millionaires, baby boomers etc. You could also segment users based on their activities, their professions or the jobs they need to get done or maybe by their behaviors or their motivations to do certain tasks. We will see an example of this in the next slide. The final step is to create profiles of your target audience. These profiles, also known as biopersonas, should include detailed information about your customer goals, pain points and preferences. Biopersonas are fictional characters that represent real users. It could be a typical user of your product. There could be multiple biopersonas depending on how many target segments you have. By creating profiles, you can better understand the needs and motivations of different customer segments and tailor your product strategies according to those needs. Let's look at an example of the target segments. By glancing at these few examples, you can see that these people may need the same garden supplies for the garden that they are doing. Let's say we are building an app. Looking at these customer personas, we might think that these all are like involved in the garden and they might have same challenges or pain points. But their motivation, their problems and the challenges they are facing is very different if you look closely. Again, it is okay to target multiple customer segments, but you should be clear on which segments you are going to solve for your product. Here we have identified customer into four segments here. Customer one is a passionate gardener. Customer two is a homesteader. Customer three is a healthy lifestyle seeker. And customer four is an entrepreneurial. Here customer one is passionate about gardening and they do this as their hobby. They want to make the garden look beautiful and show it to their friends and family. Customer two is someone who is gardening to save money by growing their own vegetables and living a healthy lifestyle with that. Customer three is more focused on living a sustainable lifestyle and prioritizes organic food instead of buying it from the supermarket. They're not necessarily focused on saving money through this, but this is an investment to lead a healthy and sustainable lifestyle. Finally, the customer four is into agriculture business. They might be a farmer or a supply manager and looking into commercializing this through gardening. Overall, but initially it looks like they all are into gardening while we look at the different customer segments. We realize that they might have very different needs and pain points. Therefore, it is important to identify and determine which customer segments they're targeting through a product when we are building such products. Let's look at an example of customer profile. Once again, product personas or customer profiles are fictional characters that represent real users within your target segment. Let's say you've launched launching a product for easy user onboarding for a B2B app. We will put a name for the persona and the demographics. This helps bringing all of the stakeholders on the same page about the typical user and telling the story about the user that we are building the product for. Let's say John is a middle-aged man who works at a mid-site organization. He's a customer success manager and uses your product for creating user onboarding experiences and enable users to achieve their goals with the contextual in-app guidance and resource center self-help materials. We will also put our hypothesis about their jobs to be done, their challenges they face while trying to achieve these jobs to be done. And we will get into more details about understanding what jobs to be done are, but please note that I'm saying that this is a hypothesis and we will validate this through our user service. For John, the jobs to be done are user onboarding new users, increasing the user retention rate, increase user satisfaction, reduce the support ticket volume for the company and decrease the turn rates. The challenges are the user onboarding is very time-taking. Customers want personalized onboarding guides and the request that he receives from the customers is often very redundant. And all of this is our hypothesis for now. So now, what is jobs to be done? And how do we discover it for a user customer? Customer uses products to get the jobs done. This is their goal that they want to achieve whether through a product or a service is a means. Jobs to be done segregates the product scenarios from the product or a solution. They're simply problem-oriented. Jobs to be done can be functional, social, or emotional. For example, if you look at the left, customer don't want a quarter-inch drill, but what they ask for is a quarter-inch hole. Similarly, the example on the right, when we are hungry, we do not just need to feed ourselves. We make decisions based on various functional, emotional, and social factors that change according to circumstances. Imagine choosing a restaurant. You may make different choices depending on whether it is a romantic appointment, a business meeting, or a family lunch. You're always the same person and yet you have different needs and expectations. So you hire the product or the service that helps you get the job done. So how do we discover the jobs to be done? First, it is important to put down our hypothesis about what you think is the jobs to be done for a user. Secondly, when we start interviewing the users, we can validate those with the users itself. Sometimes through the user interviews, we can define our jobs to be done or find new ones as well. You can ask users during the interview what jobs they are trying to get done or what goals they are trying to achieve currently through the product. What defines success on their job? Why are they using the current products? This would help us letting answers from users about the jobs to be done. These are some additional examples of the jobs to be done on the left, which irrespective of the solution, it is achieved. On the right, we have how those were achieved through various solutions. Jobs to be done is, for example, over here, jobs to be done is to ingest medicine. It could be done through either pills and shots or it could be done through skin patches. Similarly, cleaning teeth is a job to be done. It could be done either through manual brushing or it could be done through an automated brushing and so on and so forth. We have identified the target personnel. We have defined the platform through which we are going to interview the users, whether it's through surveys or one-on-one interviews where we have identified the goal of the interview and we have our hypothesis for the jobs to be done and the pain points suddenly written down. Now, we are going to validate those through the interviews and surveys and get to know the priorities for those for our users. During the interview, we will ask the users why any task is important for them? How important it is for their role? What is the frequency of those tasks? And lastly, how painful it is or in other words, how satisfied they are with their current experience of doing those tasks or the jobs to be done? After every interview, we should debrief with the team on what are the findings, what new jobs to be done or discovered with the users and what revisions you need to do for those based on the user feedback. We accordingly refine our questions for our next interviews. Some guidance for the interviews is always interview the actual user personnel and not someone who works closely with those users or just know about their work. Toxic personnel could make some assumptions and you might not get an opportunity to discover the latent needs in that case. Secondly, ask open-ended questions. What, why and how questions? If you ask leading questions, there might be a confirmation bias in the answers with the users. Giving a yes-no answers for new questions which might mislead your product discovery. You should interview at least five to ten users for user personnel to get a complete picture of their pain points and challenges. Lastly, please allow sufficient time for the users to answer the questions. Please block the meeting in advance with the users with a clear agenda. Optionally, you could also partner with someone in your team who could help you with the note taking or you could take turns switching your roles of the interviewer as well as the note ticket. So how do we, once we have identified the various jobs to be done, how do we prioritize the right customer problems to solve for through your product? So once we have a good understanding of our users through defining target segments, defining customer personas and interviewing our users, we will prioritize what are the problem areas we need to address for our customers. So actually in this figure, this is a graph for jobs to be done, plotted for job importance versus the product satisfaction. You will take all of the jobs to be done we identified on the scale of how important that jobs to be done is versus how satisfied the users are with the current solution. So on the top is the over-served area. These are jobs to be done which are relatively less important, but users are very satisfied with the current solution. This is an over-served area. Even on the top right, even if the jobs to be done is paid on the importance, but users are highly satisfied with the current solution for that particular task. So even if we make a new product thinking that this is a high ROI area, it would be hard to get a product market fit over here and how hard to make the users switch to this new product even if the product is very good. The next is the served right area which is again less than five on the importance or like relatively lesser on the important but it is still users are still fairly satisfied with the solutions they have. The next is the underserved area on the bottom right is it is the area where we have the jobs to be done with the relatively higher importance but the solutions that are there currently are not non-satisfied. This is an underserved product area and this is where we need to focus to solve for the user problems. There are multiple ways to prioritize what problems to solve for but if you follow this approach we will avoid for solving for the product areas which are already very well-served with the existing products and solutions. Finally, a little bit about going about solving the prioritize problems. How do you go about solving customer problems? Always follow a design thinking process. Number one, ID 8. Second is prototyping and third is testing. You can do this in loop. Number one, ID 8. Brings down with the right people go wide first and then narrow down the solution approach. Prototyping, show your ideas, get feedback and iterate faster. It does not have to be a pretty high fidelity mockup but just need to be clear to the user to understand how you are going about it. You could use a low fidelity mockup like in Balsamic or Figma to start collecting user feedback from the end users directly. The third is test. Try it out, show future users to identify strengths and challenges in a proper solution. Failure is totally okay but iterate and go back to the step one after that. You could also use some POCs like very small MVPs to quickly launch to the users and get to collect feedback. Then finally, set your OKRs before launching the products so that you could track their progress. Just get customer feedback once you start launching your MVPs and constantly monitor the metrics and usage. You could use the arms metrics, acquisition, activation, retention and monetization or you could go by the heart metrics, happiness, engagement, adoption, retention and finding the task success. This was all about how to prioritize the right problems to solve. I will do a quick recap. Number one, being customer centric means that a business places the customer at the center of everything it does. It's a strategy that prioritizes understanding the customer's needs and tailor its products accordingly. By doing so, companies have been able to build strong brand loyalty, generate revenue and create a competitive advantage in the industry. Understanding your customers is essential to building a successful product. By identifying your target audience, creating customer personas and conducting customer service and interviews, you can gain valuable insights into the needs and preferences of your customers. And use that information to create products that truly meet their needs. It is important to put down our hypothesis about the pain points and jobs to be done for a user. You just use products to achieve their goals and do the jobs to be done. A product or service is just a means. Defining jobs to be done helps us to be problem-oriented and segregates our product scenarios from the solutions we choose. When we start interviewing the users, we can validate those jobs to be done with the users. Sometimes through the user interviews, we can define our jobs to be done or find new ones as well. Finally, we prioritize with jobs to be done. We want to focus on for solving for our product, which is an underserved area. Basically, the most important and where the users are most dissatisfied with their current experience of the product. Thank you, everyone, for listening to me. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn or through email. Thank you.