I talked a lot about how design and prototyping is important do develop the product in accordance to the customer's needs. However, sometimes our product does not meet the customers need, -not even in the prototype phase. What is the reason? The wrong user test group? Wrong features? Unclear communication?

There is more to that. Sometimes we can get trapped in building the thing right, adding features trying to desperately meet the needs and wishes of our potential users but fail to consider that we build simply the wrong thing. Or the other way around: we build the wrong thing and no matter what we add, the problem is that we didn't build it right. 

It is critical to be aware of that trap and consider this before and throughout the development process.

Building the right things but failed to build it right

How can we prevent building the wrong thing?

In order to build the right thing, we need to identify what the user needs. As we know, that a user wouldn't necessarily communicate all his needs or might not even know them, we need to dig a little deeper. We need to understand our customer. Typical marketing analysis would propose to create a "persona", frame the customer by attributes (demographics, race, living situation etc.) But there is a risk with this framework: you might create a persona that suits your product instead of turning it the right way around - the persona has a problem that you need to solve. In order to understand that problem, you need to put yourself in the position of this person, understand the pain points and also understand the job that needs to be done. The "Job-to-be-done" framework (JTBD) is a human-centered-design method that focuses on the activity the customer wants to do and its purpose. When he does this specific thing, what does s/he see, feel, say? What problems might s/he encounter? The framework focuses on the task of a product or a service and in how far this task can be done differently, better, more efficient or more effectively. By analysing the job-to-be-done and what the pain-points are, we can be sure that we develop a product that our potential customer would use for accomplishing this specific job.

How can we prevent building the thing wrong?

Building the thing right is the biggest challenge. In an organisation or a team with multiple stakeholders and multiple tasks and responsibilities, it can be as simple as that communication hinders the product or service being developed to be lean and perfect. Communication plays a big role as we have seen with the architectural fails above. Cleary, instructions and clear precise modelling before starting is important. Also, it is crucial to make sure that everyone works towards the same goal and has a clear understanding of how this goal looks like and how it can be accomplished. Developing in software has two different, equally important development phases: the software (backend) and the interface (frontend). Often, the lack of collaboration or misunderstandings of these two, mostly separate teams, can complicate the development or even result in the product to mismatch the job-to-be-done. 

As communication is a big part, requirements (technical or non-technical) are equally important. The business analyst, together with the designer and the customer, need to work together towards understanding the job-to-be-done and how to transform this into a sustainable product. A clear briefing as well as guidelines and specifics can ensure that the product will correctly match the expectations.