Once Epics are entered, they should be approved as well before being prioritized in the Epic Backlog for Progressive Elaboration. To help approve Epics, certain supporting artifacts and information should be known (some of the information may come from the Lean Canvas).
- Competitive Analysis
- Customer Research & Validation
- Persona Development
- Journey Mapping
Competitive Analysis
Why is a Comprehensive Competitive Analysis Important?
To achieve and maintain a competitive advantage in reaching and selling to your target market, you must possess a thorough knowledge of your competition. An in-depth competitive analysis will provide you with the following:
- An understanding of how your existing and potential customers rate the competition.
- A positive identification of your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses.
- A mechanism to develop effective competitive strategies in your target market.
Do I Need to Analyze All of My Competitors?
There are several markets where it is relatively easy to name every competitor. These are concentrated markets where only a handful of competitors exist. If this is the scenario for your product or service, you will need to develop an analysis for each competitor. The steel industry and automobile industry are examples of these types of markets.
If you are selling in a market with many competitors, your job of analyzing the competition becomes a little more difficult. Since it is unrealistic to collect and maintain information on dozens of competitors, you will be able to save yourself valuable time, without sacrificing the integrity of your competitive analysis, by using the old 80/20 rule. In fragmented markets with many competitors, it is most probable that 80% of the total market revenues are accounted for by 20% of the competition. It’s the 20% you would examine most closely.
For instance, in the computer industry, the personal computer market, is represented by hundreds of clone manufacturers with the majority of the market being captured by a handful of manufacturers such as Compaq, IBM, and Apple. When using this approach it is important to keep abreast of your market for new and upcoming players who through some variable, whether it be new technology or an aggressive advertising campaign, may become a dominant player.
What Means are Available to Limit and Control the Competition?
Marketers of different brands of products will often pursue a particular market segment. Market Segmentation, which is the means of breaking down larger markets into smaller ones requiring different marketing mixes, is a means for strengthening and focusing your attempt to limit and control the competition. There are however, a broad range of strategies a business can employ in a competitive environment — from price changing and new packaging to improving customer service and new product development.
Customer Research & Validation
Testing Your Problem, Market, and Customer Assumptions Before Development:
In order to develop a product that someone will pay for is to find a large enough customer base to support the product viability, understanding those customers and their problems (and how they currently solve those problems), and learning how you can access those customers efficiently.
The first set of interviews will test the problem hypotheses: whether your customers are who you think they are (customer segment), whether they have the problem you think they have (problem), and discovering the existing solutions.
The second set of interviews will define the solution: testing whether the early adopter customer segment has been identified accurately, whether the solution will work for them, and whether the pricing is agreeable.
To do so, turn your assumptions into falsifiable hypotheses (in the form of a question you can prove or disprove) and then, as Steve Blank said, “Get out of the building!”
Sometimes the customers are already coming to you, and that’s also a great opportunity for learning. Lean Canvas inventor Ash Maurya connected a 1-800 number for customers to call in and chat for free, in order to consult with them about their problems, and eventually through this medium, came to understand his customers’ problems in an intimate way, which eventually helped him to write a best-selling book that effectively scaled his consultancy.
Talk to Customers in Person
At this point, it may seem that there are ways to avoid the interview processes while still learning what you need to know, or that the interview process is useless because customers don’t really know what they want… but the interview process truly is the most efficient and accurate way to understand the customer in order to build something they will pay for.
It’s true that customers don’t know what they want. However, it’s not the point to discover what people think they want, but to understand the problems they have so you can develop a product that delivers on what people didn’t know they wanted or needed – unique value.
But what if you are your own customer? Well, it does help to have an insider’s view of a problem, however the product will eventually need to be sold to someone else in order to be viable for the business, so regardless of whether the problem seems compelling to you, the opinion of paying customers matters more than your own. You may think the problem is obvious, but who is to say that the problem you experience is at all universal?
Also, there are questions that are not relevant to the developer with the problem, such as pricing. (It may seem that pricing can be adjusted at the end of the process, because you can churn out a product quickly and then manipulate the price. However, if no one wants to buy what you’ve developed, at any price, it’s more efficient to learn this sooner than when the product is ostensibly complete. It’s pretty expensive to waste time developing something no one else wants.)
Although it may seem that a survey would be better suited to contacting a massive number of customers, it really isn’t necessary to do so. If 10 out of 10 people are giving the same feedback about the product/ idea, or pricing, doesn’t it seem like they make a compelling point?
There might be some worry that customers won’t buy what is being sold, or that someone will steal the idea. However as stated before, the initial problem interviews are for learning about the customer and problem, not for selling the product or even presenting a product. In the first rounds of interviewing, the focus is on the customer, not the product.
These customer-focused interviews are helpful for all kinds of products or ideas – even if it seems the product is not designed to solve a problem, such as a video game or movie. Understanding the customer can still lead to understanding what they desire in a movie or video game, and to producing a product that the customer is willing to pay for.
There’s no product to show the customer yet… and that’s OK. A mock-up or other demonstration product is a very effective tool for measuring response, because it is focused solely on the learning objective. For example, a teaser landing page or Google ad can be effective for testing the attractiveness of the Unique Value Proposition because that is all it offers.
Measure Your Efforts
"If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it."
At this point, the focus of learning is still on making product decisions. Previously, those decisions were based on what customers said, or qualitative measurements. Now, it’s time to measure what customers actually do, with quantitative measurement.
A metric is useful when it can positively link specific and repeatable actions to observed results; a metric is not useful when it offers no insight into what caused the result or what will happen next.
One hint that a metric belongs to the latter category, is when the number only increases, such as number of web hits or number of downloads. These numbers may be part of a larger metric that does matter but on their own, these numbers are meaningless.
Remember that to be meaningful, a metric needs to be: actionable, meaning that something can be done with it; accessible, meaning it can be understood; and auditable, meaning there is a way to verify its accuracy. As before, the preferred way to achieve these goals with the chosen metrics is to create a dashboard to ensure that learning can be captured and disseminated effectively.
At this stage, the dashboard must convey both quantitative, analytic information as well as qualitative, customer-relations information. This will help to get to the ideas behind measurements – a measurement alone can reveal that something is going wrong, but it can’t necessarily reveal why – but customers can.
Persona Development
What is a Persona?
A persona, first introduced by Alan Cooper, describes an archetypical user of a product or system, a fictitious person who would interact with your product or system. Your description is based on knowledge that you have gathered through research of actual users, and is a composite of details that describe actual users’ behavior and their goals. Personas are active users, not passive buyers.
A product or system will ideally develop about three main personas upon which to base their design decisions, too many more means that your product scope may be too large. You want your product to be responsive to the needs of its audience; before you can be responsive, however, you need to begin with getting specific about who are your clients and what is their need. In Alan Cooper's succinct terms: "make up pretend users and design for them".
Why a Persona?
When developing a product or system that will be used by actual people, it is best to design with actual people in mind. Although it would seem that a demographic study, or even defined user roles, would be the best way to design with the customer in mind, those methods have their shortcomings:
A demographic study allows only the broadest generalizations – it gives us an idea of who average buyers are, and it helps to inform us about what kinds of personas to develop.
The reason we don’t stop with the demographic study is that it doesn’t describe the behaviors or lived experience of users. A demographic study tells us only what but it doesn’t say how our product or system will effectively fit into their lives, which is the necessary focus when designing a product or system to which you want people to return.
Defined user roles such as also seem like they would be a way to keep the customer in mind, but again, roles give a brief and generic description of how the person interfaces with the product or system. For example, “Customer” could be “person or organization who does business with us.” When used to design the product or system, roles often acquire flexibility to accommodate the product instead of the other way around, the product being adapted to suit the ideal user. For example, roles can have expectations projected onto them such as the expectations that a user role will be willing or able to acquire another new skill, while a persona may highlight a variety of reasons that is unreasonable.
Ideally, your personas are based upon research trends and patterns. It’s true that the team could use this information in the format of raw data, but developing and using personas can inform and keep the team focused on how actual users behave and what are their actual goals. Raw data lacks human relatability and can lead us to an idealized or stereotyped understanding of our customer - forgetting that we want actual people (not data points) to use what we create.
As you develop your product, the persona will help you to make and justify your design decisions, by helping you to understand the world from your user’s perspective. If you don’t have time to test your design in the ‘real-world’, you can “test” your product by assigning scenarios and personas to your team members. If a person who is play-acting the persona has trouble with the design, there is a high probability that an actual user may have the same problem.
Developing the Agile Persona.
Identify Your Target Audiences with a Provisional Persona.
The Empathy Map brainstorming technique can work for developing a provisional persona. Designed to help a group 
understand a particular viewpoint, the Empathy Map is used to predict what might be important or unimportant, helpful or harmful to an individual.
A provisional persona is useful for you to use when targeting your field research, to verify or falsify current assumptions of which users are. It’s recommended that you develop a provisional persona regardless of whether you plan to collect first-hand information about your target users.
This activity takes about 10-15 minutes and is suitable for smaller groups of 3 to 10 people.
Draw a template diagram that looks like the one above on a sheet of poster paper.
Ask your group to segment your user base into what they feel is the significant groups of users. There are many ways to do this, none of them wrong as long as you are able to determine users that are important to your business. Alan Cooper, the inventor of the persona, has this to say:
“It’s less important that a persona be precise than accurate. That is, it is more important to define the persona in great and specific detail than the persona be the precisely correct one.”
Give your predicted user a brief outline such as their age, gender, education level, or other pertinent demographic information. Ask the group to describe the person’s experiences in each category, from this person’s point of view. As you work through the persona, you will find that there are things that you just don’t know about this person – those questions can help inform your research.
The goal of the exercise is to generate a degree of empathy for the person, within the group. Ask the group to synthesize their responses: What drives this person: what do they want/what are their goals? How does this person move through life? What can we do for this person?
(The Empathy Map is useful for development of a provisional persona to assist with product visioning, but it can also help you to find points of leverage and improve internal processes through exploring the imagined viewpoint of any real person from the receptionist to the CFO.)
Start With Your Users
Your provisional persona has helped your team to identify who they imagine to be their end user(s) and what questions they still had, helping you to focus your research.
Data sources that can help you find who might have the answers to those questions can include market segmentation, existing user information, call center data… website developers can even use a tool like Google Analytics to segregate the characteristics of new vs. return site visitors.
If you have no existing user base, information about your competitors’ customer base might also serve your needs. (Do not rely solely on self-reported information – that is not necessarily representative of the full spectrum of your users’ identities.)
Use this information to identify trends and data clusters; those clusters indicate whom you should talk to, and how many personas you should develop.
You will need to gain access to 5-30 users for each persona type to participate in your information-gathering process. If you can’t find enough people from your own user base, use a recruiting agency.
A small number of participants is good enough as long as the process includes some observation. Observation is a rich source of information about real-world situations our participants find themselves in. A huge number of responses is unnecessary, as this isn’t intended to be statistically sound research, but is an attempt to learn the truths and trends associated with the realities of our users’ lives, and those ideas will coalesce even in a small number of responses. The law of diminishing returns applies, and further interviews are valuable only as long as they continue to reveal new information.
Talk to Your Audience
Once you have your foundational work done, your participants identified and your questions ready, you’re going to want to set up the interview to work for maximum effectiveness. This includes purposefully selecting the setting and method of recording the conversation.
Direct, unfiltered interaction with your participants is the best way to connect with them and gain empathy for your participants and their experience. Most of communication is not the words used, or even the tone of voice, but the emotional content of a person’s body language and facial expression – something that is hard to discern in any way other than personal contact. If you can’t interview the participants yourself, interview someone else who has had direct interaction with them.
For the optimal outcome, don’t go alone. The session should have a moderator, and a scribe or other method to capture the interaction without slowing down or drawing attention away from the session. A natural setting will allow you to capture natural behavior.
Using a scribe to capture the session can set participants at ease since their faces and voices aren’t being recorded. However, you need to ensure that you capture your interaction accurately. If your scribe is taking notes by hand, there is the possibility that something will be missed. If you scribe is typing notes, the typing may distract your interviewee, so position your scribe where that’s less likely to happen.
Audio recording is a minimally invasive method of backing up your note taking, and you can share compelling audio clips with stakeholders. Just be sure that you operate ethically, informing your participants that you are recording them. To reduce liability, you can gain their verbal consent when you start the recording.
Video recording is also a very useful tool, since part of the information you’re attempting to capture is the larger context in which your user’s experience takes place: their behaviors, the programs and forms they use, the systems and workarounds they’ve developed for themselves, the tools they use, how they organize their tasks. In some circumstances, it is impossible to ask questions that would yield the same depth of information as simply seeing the participant’s environment.
If the participant’s environment is digital, using a screen-and-audio recording program could be the most appropriate way to record the interaction. (Unfortunately, there is not currently a good way to do this with mobile devices.)
Synthesize Your Data
In order to discover trends and patterns among your participants, it’s important to compare only those participants who fill the same role: within a retail business you’d want to compare sales people to other sales people, not sales people to accounting staff or management. The tasks that people perform routinely typically determine the role, and not necessarily peoples’ attitudes or behaviors.
In order to compare people in the same role, you’ll need to determine your criteria for comparison: which attributes to use to rank or measure each participant. You may choose attributes such as how many clients a participant serves in a day, or how they make decisions, or the length of their work experience in that position.
To determine how many and which comparisons to make, review your interview responses to see if you can note any distinct difference in attitudes or behaviors. Between 5 to 15 factors is best; you don’t want to sort to finely or you’ll end up creating many case studies and not a few personas!
The attributes to choose to measure each participant against, will help you to determine which participants can be grouped together to inform a composite persona. You’ll compare your participants on those attributes, in a relative (and not absolute) sense. Once you have identified participants that share multiple attributes in a relative way, start to group those participants; together their shared attributes will help you to flesh out a representative persona.
Synthesizing your interview data into persona(s) is much more of an art than a science; most of the time the patterns that you find among participants will be uneven and imperfect.
If it seems that you aren’t finding data trends among the comparisons you’re making, try making other comparisons! The process of finding affinities among your participants may be arduous, but in the end it will be easier create well-crafted personas because you went through the process of getting to know your participants so intimately.
Here are a couple of examples of personas:
Customer Journey Map
Customer journey maps are a compact visualization of an end-to-end customer experience. This visualization empowers your business to make value-driven decisions based on a customer experience model of performance.
Common questions about journey maps include:
- Are customer journey maps strategic or tactical?
- Do they illustrate cyclical or linear customer experiences?
- Can they apply to all customers or more narrow customer segments/personas?
- Should they look like grid maps or do they have to include highly visual depictions of the customer journey?
Customer journey maps can be any of these as long as they include certain essential components. The bottom line is that they should help stakeholders deepen their understanding of their customers’ behaviors, thoughts, and feelings across touchpoints in their journey and they should be actionable. Building your customer journey maps with these key attributes will help to ensure that they meet these goals, making them central components when developing an experience strategy for your organization.
5 Key attributes of effective customer journey maps.
1. Build from a customers’ point of view, not an internal business point of view.
A journey map that is built from a customer’s point of view will use the customer’s experience as the foundation of the journey map. Rather than thinking of the stages and steps of the journey from a systems or business process perspective, the journey is based on what the customer does. This extends to what they think and how they feel, as they interact with your brand across multiple touchpoints and/or relationship stages.
Customer Journey maps should be designed with specific customers in mind and, ideally, based on a deep, research-driven understanding of your customers’ experiences. Whether you are modeling an experience that applies to all of your customer segments or personas, or a specific personas, the journey map should clearly communicate which segments or persona’s journey are being modeled. In essence, the journey map should be built on a real understanding of their behavior, thoughts, and feelings throughout their journey.
We recommend starting your journey map by building a hypothesis customer journey map based on employee knowledge of their customers and leveraging existing customer data—both qualitative and quantitative. Depending on the scope and potential impact of the journey or experience you are mapping, and the richness of the data you have available to you, the hypothesis journey map might be all you need.
2. Capture customers’ perceptions of their experiences relative to their goals, needs and expectations.
Journey maps should have a purpose and should be actionable.
Actionable journey maps clearly identify both positive and negative customer emotions throughout their journey and put them in context of customer behaviors, goals, and expectations. Businesses use their data to identify opportunity areas and to assess the impact of current and future CX/UX investments.
For example, key pain points can be evaluated by assessing the cost and effort of eliminating the pain point relative to the value a more positive customer experience will have on the business. Similarly, current investments in positive movements in the customer journey can be assessed to determine the optimal level of ongoing investment.
3. Illustrate the customers’ current or future journey across multiple touchpoints rather than focusing on a single touchpoint.
Many enterprises are organized in silos – with each silo focusing on optimizing specific channels, touchpoints, and/or aspects of the end-to-end customer experience. It is not uncommon for each group or function in an enterprise to design and measure customer experiences independently of each other. But customers think of all their interactions with a company as connected.
This assumption of connectedness impacts customer expectations and drives the need to intentionally orchestrate customer experience across touchpoints. Effective customer journey maps help businesses:
- See potential gaps in their customer’s experience between touchpoints.
- Assess the impact of these gaps.
- Provide insights into how to optimally orchestrate the customer experience across touchpoints to drive business value.
4. Incorporate performance indicators.
A key function of customer journey maps is to identify critical opportunity areas based on an understanding of your customers’ perceptions of their experiences. Performance indicators provide the evaluative framework for making journey maps actionable.
Many customer journey maps leverage qualitative insights to visualize customers’ emotional highs and lows. Visual indicators that indicate positive/neutral/negative or exceeds/meets/does not meet expectations are commonly used. This generalized approach to performance indicators can be used effectively to identify and evaluate opportunity areas.
Some helpful metrics you may want to include in your customer journey maps include:
- Net Promoter Score (NPS) or other customer loyalty measures.
- Customer Satisfaction Measures.
- Quantitative assessments of the primary emotions your customers are experiencing at specific stages or touchpoints in their journey.
- Measures of effort.
- Measures of importance, helpfulness, etc. of a specific touchpoint.
The metrics you collect and include in your journey maps should help you measure the health of your customer experience, now and in the future. And in doing so, they should empower your stakeholders to make value driven decisions based on a model of customer experience performance.
5. Visualize the customer journey to optimize stakeholders’ understanding, engagement, and decision-making based on the journey map story.
What makes customer journey maps especially powerful is the ability to layer other relevant information into the map along with the foundational journey elements and the ability to visualize your map in a way that will inform and engage your target audience. In fact, multiple versions of a customer journey map might be the most effective approach to meet the needs of different stakeholder audiences.
For example, you might best engage your executives by including key performance metrics in your map. In fact, a customer journey map is an especially effective way to contextualize the performance dashboards often presented to executive leaders with the real customer experience across touchpoints.
Other stakeholders might benefit from information like a detailed view of the “behind the scenes” people, processes, and systems (often referred to the “back office or “back stage”) involved in delivering the customer experience at each touchpoint, so they can gain clear visibility to how the domains they have control over is contributing to either positive or negative customer experiences.
Conclusion
Effective customer journey maps are both art and science. Ensure you optimize your investment in customer journey maps by incorporating these 5 essential components. Collaborate within your organization to bring together the best thinking about qualitative CX/UX insights, quantitative CX/UX insights, strategy, and design. Be sure to leverage visual designers who are skilled in data visualization to make your journey maps engaging and actionable.