Have you ever used a software product that felt like it was designed just for you?

One that anticipated your needs and made your experience effortless and enjoyable? This fren, is the power of a product-led approach to software.

Amidst an ever rapidly changing landscape, the product-led approach is one that allows companies to create a sustainable, competitive advantage by ensuring what you’re building is relevant and providing value to the people who use your product.

By focusing on delivering value to the user from the start, companies can differentiate themselves from competitors who rely solely on dated, old-school methods like sales and marketing (😴) to acquire customers.

A product-led approach means putting the product and experience of it at the forefront of everything you do.

It's about striving to design a product that is intuitive, easy to use, and clearly demonstrates to the user from the moment they interact with it, how it enhances their life.

The quality of the product itself becomes the driving factor for customer acquisition and retention.

How The Product-Led Growth Model Works.

“Understand your value. Communicate the perceived value of your product. Deliver on what you promise.” - Wes Bush

At the core of a product-led approach is a deep understanding of the customer.

The primary goal is to create a product that is not only useful but also compelling and valuable to the customer. This requires a deep understanding of the customer's needs, preferences, and pain points, as well as an ongoing commitment to innovation and continuous improvement.

By understanding how customers use the product and what features they value most, you can make informed decisions about product development allowing you to prioritise the features that matter most.

In order for this to happen there are often quite radical shifts in company culture that need to take place to facilitate this.

All members of the team from engineering to marketing to sales focus on creating and delivering the best possible product to the user.

Understand Your Users Needs.

By this point you are hopefully aware that your users are crucial to the product-led approach. This means you should be attempting to start every discussion and every decision with your users needs first.

You need to be very careful not to project your own point of view onto them and their world because of what you want them to do.

This is about deeply understanding their world, from their point of view.

It’s more complicated than it sounds.

The focus on the user often starts to gets blurred when the building starts. The team begins to get lost in requirements, technical decisions, mis-communications and trade offs.

In order for you to keep on track with understanding and building for your users, there are a few principles and frameworks we can use to assist with this.

Generative Research.

This is the first crucial step when starting to build a product. If you don’t conduct generative research, it’s likely you will end up creating something that no one actually needs or uses.

Generative Research is normally conducted at the beginning of the product development process to help designers and developers better understand the needs, behaviours, and motivations of users. It helps us to crystallise a clear “why”.

It’s also possible to introduce generative research throughout the product development process to inform iterative segments of design and development cycles.

The insights generated through generative research can help identify user pain points, opportunities for improvement, and potential solutions that can inform the design and development of a product and normally results in a series of well defined hypothesis for example:

We believe this feature will result in this outcome for this persona

User Personas.

Personas are representations of your users and are a combination of needs, desires, and pain points of these groups.

The persona you create is a series of fictional characters, created to represent a group of potential users for your product, based on real user research and data, such as surveys, interviews, and analytics.

They can help teams communicate and align around the user's needs, and prioritise features and functionality that will be most valuable to the user.

Each persona typically includes demographic information for example age, gender, education, and job title, as well as information about the user's goals, motivations, frustrations, and behaviours related to your product.

For example, a user persona for a fitness app might be

Jenny, a 28-year-old working professional who wants to lose weight and stay motivated to exercise. She works part-time as a waitress which means she has the free time to work out and may need prompting to make it a priority to meet her goals, she also so struggles to find consistency with training due to her changing schedule.

Jobs To Be Done.

This approach emphasises the importance of understanding the context in which a user is trying to accomplish a “job”, based on the idea that customers "hire" products to help them accomplish a specific job, rather than just buying them for their features or benefits.

This includes taking into their goals, challenges they face, and emotional drivers that influence their decision-making when making a “hire”.

By understanding the “job” a customer is trying to accomplish, it’s easier to design products that better meet their needs and satisfy the users needs.

It also helps to highlight "jobs" that are not being done or that are being done poorly by existing products which can help companies identify new opportunities for innovation and product development.

A typical could statement could look like:

Motivation → I want to listen to my favourite songs

Context → while exercising

Result → so that I can feel motivated and inspired

Constraint → without having to listen to commercials or skip songs I don’t like.

Evaluation research

Evaluation research for products typically involves collecting data from users through various methods such as surveys, interviews, usability tests, and user feedback.

This means getting as much of what you’re doing into the hands of users and collecting data on how they feel about it. Are you on the right track? Do they find it useful? Is it something they would be willing to “hire”?

The data is then analysed to determine how well the product is performing in terms of usability, functionality, and overall user satisfaction.

Evaluation research is important because it helps your team identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions about where the product is currently at, but more importantly where it needs to be.

By collecting feedback from users, your team can identify pain points, usability issues, and opportunities for new features or improvements that can make the product more effective and appealing to users.

Meeting Needs Through Design Thinking.

Design thinking is an iterative process in which you seek to understand your users.

The best aspect about design thinking is it’s human-centric, which means it encourages you to challenge your own assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions which you can prototype and test- for people!

It’s an iterative and non-linear process that contains five phases. The design thinking process should not be seen as a concrete and inflexible approach to design, you can carry these stages out in parallel, repeat them and circle back to a previous stage at any point in the process that seems relevant.

Empathise

Gain an empathic understanding of the problem you are trying to solve. Consult experts to find out more about the area of concern and conduct observations to engage and empathise with your users.

Define

Organise the information you have gathered while empathising and define the core problems. The problems should exist in a human-centric manner defined from perspective of your users such as “Teenager’s need to understand the power of money through experience and be guided how to make wise investment choices”

Ideate

Using the statements you’ve collected during the define stage, you can now start to use these as prompts to look at the problem from different perspectives and ideate innovative solutions to your problem statement. There are many frameworks to help your team ideate: Brainwrite, S.C.A.M.P.E.R or my absolute favourite: Worst Possible Idea.

Prototype

This is an experimental phase wherein the aim is to identify the best possible solution for each of the problems identified during the first three stages. They should be inexpensive and scaled down to only contain the core elements of the ideas created from the previous step.

Test

Share and test the prototypes within the team with the intention of accepting, improving or rejected based on how well they correlate to the first 3 steps.

Conclusion

Most companies still follow the revenue-driven model, expensive marketing campaigns and gimmicks to drive engagement acquisition. As software becomes more integral to the every day life of regular people, trust and user experience become a bigger deciding factor in what a user is willing to hire to alleviate their pain points.

The product-oriented provides you with a way to manage risk by gathering data based on real world problems that your users are facing.

By analysing this data you can form hypotheses that are distilled down to what you’re going to build and how it will help solve these problems.

With tasks, features and requirements becoming more fluid under a product-oriented approach, the need for disciplined prioritisation becomes essential because high impact tasks will unlock the best results for both you and your users.

Ideas are then matured through iteration. Teams taking a product-oriented approach are continually improving the product, sometimes adding, sometimes removing. Challenge your assumptions frequently, there are no sacred cows!

Keep this process on track by following the guidelines design thinking to deliver real value to the user within 4-6 iterations.

Due to the rapid iteration and the ever-changing needs of the market, disciplined prioritisation often gets unintentionally forgotten.

Teams see prioritisation as ordering items in a swim-lane, but disciplined prioritisation is so much more than that.

Make sure what you’re working on is what your users are looking for.

Always be seeking to get feedback from your users and create incentives and opportunities for them to deliver this feedback to you.

By tracking user behaviour and product usage, you can gain valuable insights into how people are using the product and where they may be encountering roadblocks. This information can then be used to improve the product and create a more seamless and enjoyable user experience

When people are making a “hire” to solve a problem they have, the best price or the best marketing will only sway their choice so much in a highly competitive market. Remember people want a quality experience, they want to feel understood, cared for- valued.

Through engineering a high quality experience, it’s guaranteed that people will be wanting to use what you’re making. The focus then becomes building communities founded on trust, understanding and respect, the perfect environment for happy and content humans!