This document summarizes best practices for building customer-centric products based on a talk by Ritika Kapadia. It outlines a 5 step process: 1) setting up customer interviews; 2) understanding customers through open-ended questions; 3) validating solution ideas with customers; 4) validating solution details with usability studies and experiments; 5) evolving the product based on customer metrics and feedback from programs. The key takeaway is that product managers must directly interface with customers to make decisions rooted in customer needs rather than their own assumptions.

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How to Build Customer Centric
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8. TONIGHT’S SPEAKER
Ritika Kapadia

9. How to build customer centric products

10. Why?

11. Which problems to talk to customers about?

12. Example Case
Study
Colonize Venus
Colonize Venus

13. Step 1: Setting up

14. Setting up - best practices
● Have clear goals
● Choose your target personas
○ Demographic, Behavioral, Need-based
● Draft a screener
○ Recruit a mix of participants
○ Screen for quality participants
● Get participants
○ Usertesting.com
○ Market Research Agencies

15. Step 2: Understanding your customers

16. Customer interviews - best practices
● Involve the whole team!
● Make them feel comfortable
○ Put them on a pedestal
○ Be their therapist
● Do not bias the customer
○ Open ended questions, not leading questions
○ Know that you are NOT aware of your biases
● Details matter
○ Ask customers to “show” you rather than “tell” you
● Listen, listen, listen!
○ This is not a regular “social conversation”
○ Repeat back what you hear
○ Pay attention to the emotion in their voice

17. Typical question categories
● Frequency, Duration
● Why
● How
● Satisfaction (rating, details)
● Frustration (rating, details)
● Workaround
● Magic Wand
Ref: 6 socratic questions

18. Problem Discovery Hypotheses
Problem Hypothesis Validated Invalidated Inconclusiv
e
Customer
1..
Customer n
PH1 Weather conditions
on Earth are
unbearable &
unpredictable
Yes 9 8
PH2 Earth is way too lame
to live on now
Yes 3 2
PH3 Political conditions
are too unstable
No 4 6

19. Mapping problems to JTBD and Magic Wands

20. Build your persona details
● Who is the person
● What is a day in their life/on the job
● What are her jobs to be done/ activities
● What are her top pain points
● What are the workarounds
● What are her major needs

21. Listen
“Method to the obsession”

22. Step 3: Validating your solution ideas

23. Validating your solution ideas - best practices
● Is the solution addressing their
original problem?
● How would they use it - how
often, duration?
● Why would they use it?
● Rating: How well is the solution
addressing their problem?
● What’s missing?
● What would be the impact?

24. Choosing solutions
Split a 100 dollars between these 3 solutions
Solution Ideas Total Customer 1 Customer 2 Customer 3 Customer n
SI1 Weather stable safe-
dome on earth
60
SI2 New colonies on
Venus in regions with
optimal weather
10
SI3 New colonies on
Venus with super
accurate weather
prediction
30

25. Example questions
•If you had a magic wand, how would you change this?
•Can you tell me what you’re thinking right now?
•What specifically are you trying to do right now?
•Did you find this process easy or difficult?
•How did you feel when you did <X>?
•Would you change anything about this (product, screen, design)?
•Are there any changes you would make to <X> to make it (easier to use, more
efficient, easier to learn, etc)?
•Do you have any reactions to (these instructions, this UX, etc)?
•I’ve heard some from customers that they think <X>, while others don’t. What do
you think?

26. Step 4: Validating your solution details

27. Validating your solution details - best practices
1. Early feedback
a. Usability studies
b. Like/dislike
2. Preview program
a. Tight feedback loop
b. Qualitative feedback
3. In-product experimentation
a. Quantitative feedback
mindtheproduct.com

28. Step 5: Evolving your product

29. Evolving your product - best practices
1. Establishing clear customer centric metrics
2. Understanding what more people want
a. Insider programs
b. Meetups with heavy users
3. Understanding what are they doing
a. Data analysis
b. Longitudinal studies

30. Key Takeaways
● You, as the PM are the voice of the customer. You must directly interface with
customers/customer data
● Every decision should be rooted in your customer, not you or your team. That is
how you build great products that people love
● Build the right mechanisms and channels to get feedback throughout the product
cycle in the most efficient ways.

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