How do you build a customer-first strategy and structure for your business? Donald Hasson, CPO at Dashlane, shares insights on how to think about solving really hard problems for customers and how to optimize for the best results for your business.
A Lot of Things Get in the Way of the Customer
Four big problem areas culminate into blockers for being a customer-first company.
- Corralling feedback. How do you corral massive amounts of market research, customer data, insights, and feedback into something you can action on? A lot of companies have an email that becomes a black hole.
- Feature factory. Others become a feature factory, building things you don’t exactly understand and not tying it back to the customer problem.
- Lack of research. And others lack research, with no validation that you’re building the right things and just hoping everything you built meets the markets’ needs.
- Shipping and forgetting. When shipping, you need to know what you’re looking for in terms of measurement to see if this thing has achieved the desired results.
When making decisions, you’re pulling these big levers, with potentially millions of dollars of development resources at stake. Let’s look at two scenarios.
Feature A: Feature A could be a feature or product that costs about a million to build. You build it, get it to market, and it misses the mark for whatever reason. You don’t get any incremental ARR from this feature.
Feature B: Feature B also costs a million to build but generates $5M in ARR when it gets to market.
If you make the wrong choice and build Feature A, it doesn’t just cost you a million dollars. It actually costs $5M in opportunity costs. So, your decisions are critical, and you have to learn ways to de-risk what you’re building every step of the way.
For Every Problem, There’s an Answer
How you become more customer-centric comes down to accommodating people, processes, and tools. Before exploring each of those areas, let’s define some things.
You need to understand where you are in your business to apply these ideas.
- The Mr. Coffee Startup. Respectable early-stage companies might be working out of a broom closet of a break room where the caffeine supply is limited to Mr. Coffee.
- The Keurig Startup. If you’ve made the leap to $5M-$10M ARR, you’re getting more versatility in your coffee choices. You might have a decent kitchen with a Keurig machine.
- The Espresso Machine Startup. Or, you may have graduated to double-digit ARR, and you’re knocking on the door of $20M. You can step up your coffee game with an automated espresso machine.
Those are the three stages, so choose your own adventure. Map out this advice to wherever you are in your growth journey.
People
A customer-centric strategy starts with people. Why? You have to optimize their work because they are generally the most expensive asset at SaaS companies. Also, people are more flexible than processes and tools, so you can lean on them for experimentation. As you progress, layer on tooling and processing.
As you build a customer-centric structure and strategy, you have to bring on insatiably curious people. This is hard to teach, but you can hire for it. Curiosity breeds empathy and a true understanding of what motivates and drives customers. It helps you choose the most important problem and how to solve it.
You also want to be careful about over-frameworking your way out of relationships and collaboration. You want to lean on people no matter what. If you build too much processing and tooling around them, you will over-engineer and waste time.
Team Structure
Now, let’s talk about team structure. It starts with a triad at the core made up of the product manager, designer, and engineering manager or tech lead. This threesome thinks through what to build and how.
- The product manager is responsible for determining a viable solution to drive results and meet the customer’s needs.
- The product designer ensures this thing is usable, and the customer gets value out of it.
- The engineering manager or tech leads ensure it’s feasible within your timeframe and cost.
The next outer ring contains a few roles, and their job is to provide input into the prioritization process. Research and data analytics live here, along with the development team.
The outermost group comprises key stakeholders and executives who are heavily influential in the process. No matter your growth stage, these people need to be intimately aware of what you’re building, why you’re building it, and when things are coming out so they can help amplify and capture the value you’re creating.
The takeaway: No matter the stage, you’ll likely have someone doing some part of all of these roles. That means one person might be wearing multiple hats. That’s ok. The key is to be clear to everyone involved about who is doing what, why they’re doing it, and the depth they need for the role.
Investing in Functional Areas
As you scale, you add in specialization. If you’re in the $1M-$5M park, you should think about bringing on someone whose job is filling the product management role.
At the Keurig stage, it’s time for more versatility. The product manager might be doing a lot of market research, but they’re overburdened. So, it’s time to bring someone on in a full-time research role. The challenge at this stage is maximizing the value of the things you create.
If you’ve upgraded to an espresso machine, you’ve got a well-oiled coffee-making contraption, and it’s time to expect the same thing from the product development process. How can you optimize the overall process within the role of product operations?
The takeaway: These roles should be very clear. Everyone needs to understand the what and why of what they’re doing, with no ambiguity. Once you have the people in place, it’s time to improve processes to optimize how those people work.
Processes
What you’re trying to do at this point is build out a process that ensures you’re solving broader market problems. This is a huge challenge for companies in the early stages when building is based on projects and checking boxes, but they don’t fully understand it.
You want to build processes that incentivize people to think in a broader context because that’s how you get real growth. You don’t get growth solving for 1, 2, or 5 customers. Real growth comes when solving for 20%, 50%, or 75% of the market.
And it starts with prioritization.
An early-stage company might have a decently formatted spreadsheet with a list of features ranked from 1-10 on the priority list of what to build next. You want to determine why a feature is important and what the impact might be.
Then, you have the build stage, where you can run these three steps in parallel because you don’t need perfect information to get to the next step. A good question to ask yourself is if you can make something smaller. You don’t need to get something to 100% over six months if you can get a quality feature to market at 10% or 20% completion. It’s not really done yet, but it meets initial entry-level needs. This de-risks the process and provides feedback faster.
The last stage is measurement. You have to set goals, nothing heavy, to guide you on how close you are to the mark. The worst thing you can do is spend six months on something, ship it to market, and it’s crickets. Measurements tell you if you’re on the right track and mitigate risk because you can pull a feature and cut your losses early.
Roadmaps are Always Wrong, But…
There’s a continuous development process, but you still need milestones and check-ins along the way to ensure you’re on track to hitting your broader goals.
- If you’re at the Mr. Coffee stages, you may have a basic prioritization spreadsheet with check-ins every 2-4 weeks to ensure alignment.
- In the Keurig stage, you think further ahead to a quarterly basis with a more rigorous prioritization list for the team.
- Once you’re in the automated espresso machine stage, it’s time to start thinking about yearly alignment sessions. Yes, things will change, but the goal is to get alignment on how you’re thinking about the product direction and where you’re trying to go.
Tools
No matter the stage you’re in or how basic the tools are, they’re a good way to ensure your teams can easily follow the processes and should reduce the burden on your people.
- At the Mr. Coffee stage, you need good prioritization frameworks and basic feedback from emails or Slack for product managers to drop into a spreadsheet.
- Once you’re at the Keurig level, you get far more feedback. If you’re not careful, the people charged with managing that feedback will get massively overburdened and won’t keep up (the black hole) or so burdened they can’t do their main job. Tools can help manage this at some scale, like a modern roadmapping tool built for the task.
- At the advanced espresso stage, you’re getting incredible amounts of feature requests and data from partners to analysts to internal. It can quickly get overwhelming, even with good tools. So, you want to think about ways of building smart integrations.
In the chart above, you can see the tools Dashlane uses. Productboard is the roadmapping tool and source of truth. They’ve built AI tools within Gong to listen for customer sentiment and send feature requests to productboard based on those calls so that they can be incredibly proactive.
Key Takeaways
Let’s look at the key takeaways so you can roll out a right-size customer-centric strategy and structure for your business as soon as possible.
- Invest in a prioritization framework that will incentivize the broader organization to prioritize those problems you want to solve with the highest impact for the broadest segment. No more guessing. It won’t be perfect, but directionally accurate is the goal.
- On the people side, you don’t want to framework your way out of having good relationships and collaboration. Invite people to prioritization and planning events, and don’t try to build processes and tools that don’t require any people. You’ll lose too much context.
- You need tools and processes that allow you to link critical market problems back to the features you’re building. You need a balance because you can’t solve it all by talking to customers and internal stakeholders.
