4 methods for customer-centric product development

Involving customers in product development ensures that your product or service meets their needs. But how do you do this? Our business coach Magnus Mollstedt shares his experience of building Varbi, with the aim of creating the most user-friendly recruitment system on the market.

1. let everyone staff the customer support to understand the customer perspective

For the first twelve years at Varbi, we had a rolling schedule where all employees manned the frontline phone and email support to understand the customer perspective. This became a good driver for us to remove the thresholds that users got stuck on in the system and to develop the platform in the right direction. As CEO, I had the support every Friday, which meant I always got first-hand information about how customers were using our product and how they perceived us as a company.

2. Customer days to capture challenges and needs

We organized customer days, both general and industry-specific, where customers could meet each other and sit in small groups to talk about their challenges at work. In each group, we had a Varbi colleague who listened and wrote down the challenges and solutions raised by the group. We then used the notes as a basis for our future product development.

3. internal processes to understand customer needs

Every month, we gathered all employees and had the development team present what they had developed during the previous month. This was our last quality check before going live with new features. At the same time, the Customer Success and Support department presented three development points that they, based on daily dialog with customers, considered to be the highest priority to develop. This meant that we always had a strong focus on the customers' perspective and needs.

4. Observing user patterns at the customer site

One approach that strongly influenced our employees' view of customers was to visit them and see live how they actually used our system. We sent product owners, development managers and developers to our various customers in batches. For a couple of hours, they had to stand back and watch how the users worked in the system. In short, their job was to observe how the customers used the system and identify if there was any step that felt illogical, complicated or inefficient.

They were now able to see the customer's perspective in a completely new way, which helped us in our goal of developing the most user-friendly recruitment system on the market. This was something that employees referred to in a positive way for many years to come.