Techniques we use to focus on customer

They are whoever consumes your service or product, so this includes internal 'users'.

We work with business areas (especially IT delivery) to see internal users as customers. through tools, workshops, communications, and quality criteria mapping.

Customers will advise whether they value a feature of a product or not once they experience it.

Customers seldom know well what features they need, but they do know what problems they are facing.

We promote elicitation analysis to extract the features a customer will value. It elevates the experience for all from the requirements lists and traceability matrix models of last century and delivers a significant value uplift of your products and services using Design Thinking tools.

It takes money, time, and effort to obtain a customer, so you want to have your best shot at keeping them happy and being able to expand your offerings to the customer over an extended period. Think Apple - who buys just one thing from Apple?

We take senior leaders and portfolio management teams through the Value Streams concept to have a sustainable model to deliver continuous value to customers which reciprocates as value to your business.

An initial Value Streams workshop helps people move from cost-driven thinking to value-driven thinking and puts the supplier on the same wavelength as the consumer.

This technique also helps a business move from project to product thinking.

Show someone your idea, let them inspect it in their own time, then assess their reaction and feedback. Progress on positive feedback, and adapt to the suggested changes.

Do this often in an iterative manner and you will create the best solution for your internal or external customers feature by feature. 

You take the shortest and lowest cost path to allow you to answer the next set of questions, repeating the inspection and adaption with representative customer input.