Your Business Is Not About Your Product, It’s About Your Customers
Stop spinning in circles and ask your users what they want
“Hi guys, let’s add this amazing new feature.”
“We definitely have to redesign the website.”
“There is no need for these two scan buttons, let’s remove one.”
“This UI sucks. Call the team and let's change everything. ”
When you look at the above statements, this definitely looks like an active team. They’re working on the product, working on its representation, and hoping to make good changes.
Great. But wait a minute.
What kind of changes? Do they have any good arguments for making them? Is there even a need to change anything?
You develop the product. But your customers use it.
So who’s supposed to have a say here?
Can users say something also?
This is a usual trap many companies fall into. Since they have developed the product, they become merged with it so much that they see themselves as product-builders and product-users as well.
When you fall into this trap, it's hard to see beyond. You start thinking only from your perspective and you limit the world of opportunities around your thoughts alone.
We have also fallen very hard into this trap. We were so excited about our new product, a security solution, that instead of focusing on the users, we started focusing only on the product.
We fell in love with it.
We started thinking that our product is the best possible, that our scan is the fastest in the market, that our removal module is the most efficient one — and slowly but gradually we started working on features that we thought were good for our product, and eventually also good for people (from our point of view) that will use it in the end.
So, our strategy development went like this:
Us → Our product → Us again → People that will use our product
We planned to succeed with this kind of strategy. But we didn’t.
You might think that having half a million users is not bad, and it isn’t. Users like our product. There is no need to question this. But what now?
With that kind of strategy development, we could only go so far. We’d reached our peak. From that point, we could only go down. Stab around in the dark.
Developing a product looking only from your perspective can shrink your product perspective severely. You can choose to design the product not based on customer needs or jump right into customer exploration and reveal new things every day.
Finally, we choose the other way around.
Think big.
Instead of knowing what are the right answers, we started asking questions. A lot of them.
We had the questions. The users had the answers.
When you start asking a lot of questions, you realize how little you know and how much is there to learn.
By changing our product strategy development tactic, we changed the destiny of our product and company’s as well.
It’s not just about the product and it’s also not only about the users, or about us. It’s about all of us.
We are a team. There is no need to categorize and label who is the developer, who is the user and who is the product owner. We are all part of the same journey. Eventually, everything will be built into the product that all of us will use and that has to bring some kind of value to all of us.
So, while embarking on a new product launch, we also changed our strategy development tactic. Instead of telling our users what we did and how this product works, we showed them how we will work together on this product.
So, here is how we did it. With a note to our users:
Why ZAM 3.0?
All the way along we build products based on our experiences, thoughts, and ideas. But actually, all the best ideas are coming from your side so we realized.
You want a product that cleans malwares, has a super fast scan speed and is very simple to use.
No problem. We will build that kind of product for you. Simple as that.
And most importantly, we want to bring you on that journey of ours and help us make it the best antimalware it can be.
Oh, and one more thing.
Thank you for all your support. Nothing of this would be possible without you.
You rock.Let’s start the journey!
Simple and easy note. It’s never about big and amazing achievements but rather about small and steady steps. This is our first one, but definitely not our last one.
The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.— Eric Raymond
Want to change your journey? Asking your users would be a great start.
