digest
Short Summary
Main recommendation: Collect customer input by asking for advice rather than feedback, and only from early adopters, so you gather insights without committing to a roadmap or timelines. Dan Martell presents five strategies, including building a customer advisory board, avoiding the vocal minority, and circling back with customers when features ship.
Key Points
- Ask for advice rather than feedback. Feedback implies you have already committed to something, while advice keeps the decision open and prevents promises about timelines.
- Prioritize early adopters, who show where the market is heading, rather than customers who only add incremental value. This helps avoid building a mediocre product.
- Build a customer advisory board, which Martell calls an "A-Team," to test early prototypes, click flows, and marketing positioning at a lower cost to fix than after coding or building a marketing site.
- Watch out for the vocal minority, a single loud or large customer who drives the roadmap. Martell cites a company that built features for one oversized customer, leaving a third of the product unused by others while still requiring support.
- Log the name of each customer who contributed and circle back when the feature ships, which creates a "wow" experience and turns customers into raving fans.
Details Worth Noting
- Concrete instructions:
- Choose early adopters as the source of feedback, following Geoffrey Moore's technology adoption curve, which distinguishes early adopters, the early majority, and the chasm.
- Curate a group of trusted early-adopter customers as a customer advisory board. Martell's Clarity group, which he called his "A-Team," had about 25 customers he showed early prototypes, asked about click flows, and consulted on marketing positioning and launches.
- Frame every conversation with customers as a request for advice, so the team never commits to a feature or timeline. Martell says this change allowed his coaching client Heather's team to have these conversations without committing in the short or long term.
- When requesting input, use the word "advice" in the conversation, and avoid language that implies a commitment already exists.
- Record each contributing customer's name on a story card in your Agile development process, attached to the related story.
- When the feature is released to production, assign the person who spoke with the customer to contact them, thanking them for their time and telling them the release was based on their input.
- Martell's example of the vocal-minority problem involved a company that took on a customer ten times bigger than the rest, built features for them, and ended up with a third of the product unused by other customers while still needing to support the code.
Bottom Line
Frame customer conversations as requests for advice, limit them to early adopters and a trusted advisory group, and close the loop when you ship, so you learn from customers without locking yourself into a roadmap.
