The Customer-Driven Playbook

Preface

“Over the next 10 weeks, we want you to come up with product ideas that can attract new customers and triple our revenue.”

Susan, a UX lead for PartyTime Apps, felt her mouth fall open and heard the team shift uncomfortably in their chairs.

Susan and her team worked on an immensely popular mobile party-planning app called PartyOrganizr.

The app was at the top of the charts in all the mobile app stores, and the company had enjoyed several years of success. Yet leadership was looking for ways to capitalize on their success and generate new revenue.

They didn’t have a lot of time, so Susan believed the team needed to be Lean. She was going to have the team talk to as many customers as they could, iterate quickly, and—above all else—“fail fast.” She scheduled daily calls with customers and the team quickly fell into a cadence of meeting with customers, asking a myriad of questions, and taking copious notes.

The team had a lot of ideas about how they could generate new revenue, and they found that talking with customers was a great way to get direct feedback. Jerry, an engineer on the team, even started building a prototype for one of his ideas and began showing it to customers. It appeared that the team was on their way.

Then progress came to a complete halt. The team began arguing over what they were hearing from customers. Mary, a product manager, believed they weren’t asking the right questions or talking to the right types of customers. Even though it would be costly to build, ...