461: Customer use cases to guide product design – with Lilac Muller, PhD

Tips for creating customer use cases – for product managers Today we are talking about how to create and use customer use cases to guide product design.  Our guest is Dr. Lilac Muller, VP of Product Management at Kymeta Corporation. She oversees product strategy, definition, and launch activities for Kymeta’s mobile satellite communications product line, which is making mobile broadband connectivity around the world ubiquitous.  Lilac has over 20 years of product development experience in the telecommunications, consumer electronics, and medical devices industries where she has led cradle-to-grave product development efforts, and she holds 19 US patents. Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [6:35] What is a customer use case? A use case is how customers use your product or service to derive value of some kind. That value makes the customer purchase the product and recommend it to their friends. How the customer uses the product drives the requirements we as product managers write for engineers to develop the product. Defining use cases has a few challenges. First, everybody thinks it is easy, but there’s a lot of nuance. Second, not all users are the same, so creating a common use case across a market segment or sub-segment is a lot harder than one thinks. The engineers can’t design to every possible use case. That creates complexity we are trying to avoid. We’re looking for simplicity, which is derived from a very clear use case defined by product management. [8:36] How do we create a customer use case? The use case starts from the business plan—the target market vertical that the product fits the best. Narrow down the scope to the type of customers you’re going after. Then learn about those customers. We have a habit of thinking we know the answer or asking our friends, who are in the same geography and socioeconomic standard as us. For use cases, you should broaden that. When I derive use cases, there are three ways that I pursue in parallel. First, I do internet research. YouTube videos of how to do things are a great forum. What people say and what they think are different, and what they think and what they do are different yet. So you need to observe people. Second, I interview customers. I go out into the field with customers and see what solutions they’re using today and what problems they’re facing. We put an MVP (minimum viable product) into the marketplace, learn, and refine the product. Third, I use customer surrogates. In an organization, there are people who touch customers on a regular basis, and they often know customers better than the customers know themselves. When I joined Kymeta, we had just launched our first-generation product called u7. It was a technological marvel. We sold it in the market place and started getting feedback. As the head of product management, I pulled all our customer-facing teams into a conference room. These are the customer surrogates. We had a session in which they told us what customers say, answering “What do you see? If you had a magic wand, what would you change?” I had everybody write 10 things on sticky notes, and then we bucketized them and talked about them. I can trace the origins of our current product to that session. [14:32] What are the differences between defining a use case for a product that is new to customers versus for a product that competitors already sell? The hardest use case to define is when you’re trying to invent a brand new category and your competition is non-use. You’re asking a consumer to change how they do something and use a solution the didn’t even realized they needed. To generate a use case, you can use rapid prototyping, nonfunction mockups, and storyboards. Put those in front of customers or customer surrogates without any supportive information and ask,