The Lean Entrepreneur: How Visionaries Create Products, Innovate with New Ventures, and Disrupt Markets

Existing Products

All of the preceding applies to existing products, too, but the processes are more complex. You likely already have customers, though it is also likely that you haven’t done the work to divide them into useful buckets. Surveys are a good way to help segment existing customers. Key items to learn:

• What is the core problem they are trying to solve?
• What do they love about the product?
• What would they like to see improved?
• What benefits have they seen from using the product?
• How likely are they to share the product with friends and colleagues? (Net Promoter)
• How do they describe the product to friends and colleagues?
• How disappointed would they be if product were no longer available? (MustHaveScore)
• Where do they “hang out”?
• Who influences their decision making?

Use interviews and engagement data to corroborate survey results. If there are discrepancies, you likely have a problem with survey-question wording.

For complex products and those that have been out in the marketplace for a while, measuring product engagement is more difficult. More functionality means more things to track.

To get beyond this, you must be able to visualize customer product usage similar to the pre-purchase marketing funnel or pipeline: There are a number of actions that a customer typically goes through before purchasing the product, and then there is this magic moment when prospects convert to customers by pulling out their credit cards.

Similarly, there are a number of actions a customer ...