Fantastic products
In order to create great or fantastic products for your customer you need to create quality. You need to deliver your best performance and try for even more. Most customers don't precisely know what they want, but they have a fair understanding of the problem they are facing. They should name their wishes but not the solution. You have a fair understanding of all the possibilities and are in a position to come up with even more after a couple of hours of digging.
In order to create the best solution for a customers problem, find out the problem behind the question they are asking. Try and create a solution to the best of your abilities and include the customer. While you are in the solution process you and the customer are finding even more solutions to the problem you are facing. Fantastic products are fantastic because they seem simple. This often means that the process of coming to that solution is hard. Performance is key to simple solutions. Not text book solutions, but solutions that are the result of a creative process between you, your team and the customer.
What is good, what do our customers think is good
A right solution for the customer doesn't mean it is good enough for us. Do we want to deliver what the customer wants or do we want to deliver solutions that make us proud? Sometimes they match, most of the time they don't. Push your team to the best solution, the one that looks simple but is most of the time hard to obtain. A seemingly simple solution will make the customer happy, make the team better and makes the product easier to maintain.
How do we find the sweet spot
In order to find the solution that fits our customer and our needs we need to find the sweet spot. We cannot achieve victory without making choices. And sometimes we need to make sacrifices. Sacrifices in product creation are abandoning a solution you worked hard on but doesn't do it for you or the customer. It is better to let go and take the loss than to keep on going with a bad solution. Pivot if you need. Our sacrifices can include: putting more hours in, moving a deadline, getting rid of a chosen technology or process, switch people and so on.
Inspect and adapt
View your solution from the eyes of the customer, is it simple enough to understand? Can we use the product without reading an extensive manual? Do we need all the features in order to reach our goal? Is the design or layout correct and intuitive? Have we made a safe or secure product? Can we break it easily?
All these and more questions need to be asked, reviewed and improved upon. Only through regular inspection of the product and the team can we improve.
Do we know better than our customers
Yes and no. We don't know exactly what our customers want, but we know the processes and technology that we need to use in order to make a great product (or we know how to learn it). As a team we know how to work together and get all the important information from the customer. We are ready to change everything we do in order to come up with the right solution. We understand that nothing is written in stone when it comes to delivering the best product to our customers.
Our customer probably know the problem best and needs us to extract it, understand it and solve it. We can do that when we have a high performance team that is capable of customer interaction, that has extended knowledge about the processes and technology involved.
So if you want to be good, if you want to be a winner, if you want to be a high performance team, be ready to inspect and adopt as much as possible. Aim high with the team and the customer. We are not looking for mediocre results, we are not looking for something that just works, we are looking for the creation of seemingly easy to use product, with the highest quality that satisfy our customers more than they expected.
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