How to create impact with your customer (and why so many projects miss the mark)

What’s the secret sauce that guarantees you’ll exceed expectations and deliver a successful launch?

In the early 2000’s I was working on a new, bleeding edge financial advisory product. Let’s call the company TrustCo (not their real name). As is typical of a financial management firm, it had a clear goal: Get bigger. Grow the customer base. Manage more people’s money. They had a plan to do just that.

At that time, good self-service financial management tools didn’t really exist. In fact, there may have been none — depending on what you consider a good tool. Sure you could buy and sell stocks, but for someone who wasn’t a quant geek or a hobbyist trader, it was overwhelming. TrustCo saw an opportunity: Build a financial management portal that was simple to use, that offered good advice about what to do with your money, and made it easy to build a good investment portfolio (leveraging, of course, TrustCo’s diverse collection of funds).

The value statement was clear: Make investing easy for the average consumer. It sounds like a pretty good idea, right? And if we look around today, it’s obvious. Just about every financial management firm offers some kind of product in this space — TrustCo was right on the cusp of a huge opportunity.

TrustCo pretty cleanly established their customer value proposition on day one:

1. Break through barriers to investing.

2. Provide investing choices and advice that are trustworthy.

Before we talk more about TrustCo, let’s explore some groundwork.

What is “impact?”

Throughout the Delivery Playbook I talk about “impact,” but what exactly is it? The simplest definition is this: It’s what moves the needle the most with your customer. In other words, it means:

1. Delivering something of value directly to your customer.

2. Constantly prioritizing what your customer values most.

But how do we know what’s actually valuable? When TrustCo’s customers wanted “a few, easy investment choices,” where did that come from? Is it from Sara the user experience lead? Is it the product manager? Is it Fred, from account services or is it John, from legal, trying to limit TrustCo’s liability exposure? Everyone has a voice. How do we make sure our customer actually gets what’s most important to them?

And once you figure out your value proposition, is there something else that is more valuable, that you can work on now, that will deliver more impact?

Identifying and aligning around what your customer will actually value can be difficult. Sometimes the value is simply not obvious. Also, we have to separate our customer’s value from any value we (the business) might realize. But this is what it means to be impactful: To always deliver the most highly valued customer-facing feature.

TrustCo, as with most businesses, had their underlying motives — being profitable, selling their own portfolio of financial products. Good business goals should align with customer goals. If they don’t, the business won’t attract customers. Sure, TrustCo ultimately just wants to sell more of their financial products. But if that mission is pushed too hard, or if it overrides the customer facing value, it risks quickly turning off customers. That, of course, does not sell more financial products.

Sometimes, business goals and customer goals can come into conflict. At Lightbend, for instance, the value to Lightbend is to sell more services. But, of course, Lightbend’s customer (my customer, as an employee working at Lightbend) wants their product as quickly and cheaply as possible. I was fortunate that Lightbend always put customer value first. If a path forward made more money for Lightbend, but wasn’t the best path for our customer, we didn’t take it.

It can be a tricky balancing act, making sure business value is sustained while also putting customer value first and foremost. While the two are intertwined, they aren’t identical.

Customer value is the intrinsic proposition here. If conflicts arise, it’s got to be the customer value that takes precedence, or none at all. If the business mission is no longer aligned with delivering customer value, it’s time to reset. Go back to the beginning, to ideation, and rethink.

Discovering value

Sometimes discovering the core customer value is straightforward. Other times it can be challenging. This is where Value Stream Engineering (VSE) comes in. It’s a slightly intimidating term that just means taking the path that focuses on value. It’s about protecting value throughout delivery.

I say protecting value because the “value” is always there, right from the beginning. Sure, we may need to discover it and align with it. In TrustCo’s case, the value was clearly identified. The secret to being impactful is figuring out how to stay aligned with that value after ideation and protect it all the way to delivery.

We do this by “following the dollars,” so to speak. While this can sound very capitalistic, it’s also honest: Revenue is tied directly to customer value, but there are some subtle nuances to it.

In TrustCo’s case, we know customers want an easy path to investment management, not one that requires understanding options, futures, and trade margins. If we deliver this feature, it leads to portfolio sales for new customers; that’s our revenue path. Here are a few more examples:

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