Peeling the Layers of Discovery in B2B Product Management
Continuous discovery drives innovative and customer-focused products. But, busy product managers must balance discovery with the never-ending, competing priorities on their plate. Efficient discovery is just as important as continuous discovery. As you plan out your efficient discovery, consider the layers of discovery, with each layer providing unique insights, but also specific biases to consider and diminishing returns to avoid.
Your innermost layer are your Internal Advisors. These folks sit outside of the product and engineering organization and deal directly with your customers. This group hears directly from your prospective and existing customers — including account leads, solution engineers, implementation partners, customer success, and support. They will, for better or worse, tell you the raw truth:
where your customers are willing to spend time and money
why deals are won and why they are lost
how customers are struggling with implementations and go live deadlines.
Internal advisors are the most cost effective group to talk with and often, they really want to you, the product team. But, these folks also have biases that you need to be aware of. Role bias is a given - your support team should be super-concerned about product quality. Your implementers will certainly care foremost about the time and effort to get a product live. And your sales team wants a shiny new object to delight wary buyers. Recency bias means that your advisors may emphasize feedback from the most recent engagement that they had with your product - the last lost deal or the most recent product defect. This is a natural tendency and you need to be diligent to NOT over index on singular observations.
To optimize your interactions with internal advisors, team with sales and service organizations to build effective feedback loops that are an integrated part of your organization’s broader sales and service motions. This can done by allowing product teams to access CRM tools where sales notes are kept, regular participation on sales or support calls, or a more formal process of compiling and presenting sales and service feedback to the product team.
The next layer in your discovery process are your Users. Users come in all shapes and sizes, so you want to make sure you understand the different types of users for your product. Are they new users who are seeing the product for the first time? Casual users who rarely engage with your product and need reminders and prompts to get their work done? Or power users who can teach you a thing or two about your features!
An in-person visit to a user’s environment is the most effective way to understand how users are interacting your product, but can also be expensive and, often, impractical. If you do get the chance to visit in person, notice everything - not just how they use the product, but also when, where and how they access your product. I visited a customer whose number one enhancement request was a printable version of one of our features. Printing seemed like an ancient practice to my team and we deprioritized the request. But, when we visited the customer’s site, we found an open office environment with no laptops, only desktops. Private meetings occurred in small rooms with no connectivity. A printable document was a critical need for effective meetings. For both in person and virtual visits, ask users to do a reverse demo, where they demo your product to you. Pay close attention to how they navigate, what they use and don’t use and how they have configured your solution.
As an alternative to live conversation, instrumentation of user behavior is a critical and efficient input to your continuous discovery process. Instrumentation tells you what features are used most frequently, when they are used and how they are used. By tracking trends over time, you’ll recognize seasonal behavior and capture engagement drop off, an early warning sign of attrition risk. By combining both qualitative data from direct contact with qualitative data from instrumentation, you’ll learn what’s working, what’s not effective, and what features have never even been discovered!
Your next layer of discovery are your Buyers. In a B2B world, buyers are typically distinct from your user community - members of the C-suite, departmental heads - basically whoever owns the purse strings for a purchase decision. Buyers often have different priorities than users, and, unfortunately, a buyer’s priorities do not always align with users. Building a community of buyers through a Customer Advisory Group. You can optimize your time by hearing from multiple customers at a time, and, you get to be a fly on the wall as they share similar challenges across their organizations.
Strive, whenever possible, to have direct conversations with buyers at all phases of the customer lifecycle
From prospective customers, learn about their specific business priorities and how critical your product is to solving them
From implementing customers, learn what features are important day one and what drives a successful go live
From live customers, learn where your product meets, exceeds or falls short of expectations
Also invest time to understand how buying decisions are made in their organization. This question might seem more the purview of your sales team, but, with a clear understanding of the purchasing process, you’ll gain insights into how to price, bundle and market your solution going forward. Across all phases of the customer lifecycle, make sure you understand the buyers’ success criteria. What metrics do they need from you to demonstrate the value of your product to themselves and to their internal stakeholders? If you give your buyers the right metrics, they can be your biggest advocates within their organization and as a reference to other prospective customers.
A final layer to unpeel in the discovery process are External Experts. These are the analysts, thought leaders, economists, regulators and others that can provide you with an outsider’s view of your product, the market, your competitors and other externalities that impact your product strategy. They are an excellent source for valuable statistics and deeper insights that you can cite to help you sell your ideas internally and market your product externally. Direct meetings with analysts are also a great way to validate your understanding of the market and your organization’s reputation with your potential buyers.
Thought leaders make their mark by introducing new concepts, recognizing early trends, compiling insights across a broad population of customers, but also by introducing new catchy phrases, and punchy sound bites. Make sure that you don’t get caught up in the hype. These folks can tell you where the market is going, but they might also be riding a trend wave that never lands with your buyers. Pull your insights from a variety of sources and pay the closest attention to insights supported by empirical evidence. And, because product innovation often comes from borrowing ideas from unlikely places, review broader trends from external experts outside of your specific product domain.
A few final thoughts on making your discovery process as continuous and efficient as possible. Rethink your customer Idea portal, especially if it is has become a black hole of enhancement requests that only frustrates your customers and adds busy work to your PMs. Instead, consider how you might build a collective, searchable repository of insights across the discovery events within your product organization. While doing this, map out a consistent process for how your team schedules, documents and shares out discovery. And if you get this working effectively, I’d love to hear your stories!
