In the first part blog post on unlocking team potential, we looked at the power of communication. This is a vital part of team productivity but great communication extends to the customer too. Teams that continually keep the customer’s priorities top of mind are those who can deliver high-quality products that exceed expectations.

In this article, we’ll look at how a focus on a client’s needs can guide development teams and improve customer satisfaction.

Get to the bottom of the problem

What a customer says they need and what they really need aren’t always the same thing. When identifying the key pain points that will drive feature development, it’s important to make sure you’re getting to the root of the problem. For example, customers might ask to reduce update size to speed up over-the-air (OTA) processes. However, one of the challenges lies in the downtime, where our technology offers a significant advantage—regardless of the update size. This capability could be even more valuable to customers than the update size itself.

Asking questions and listening to the challenges the customer is facing is vital. In this example, a developer might dig deeper into why the customer wants to reduce update size because focusing on downtime may be more effective. Taking this active listening approach leads to solutions that deliver real value for the customer.

Ongoing engagement

Your customers should be involved throughout the entire development process, not just at the end. They should be considered partners throughout the entire product lifecycle. Looping in customers early on helps to prevent surprises, catch any issues (or scope creep), and strengthen the connection between everyone involved.

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Feedback is key

Every interaction with the customer is an opportunity to improve. While feedback between team members is important (as I talked about in part one of this series), it’s also important to give the customer plenty of chances to give feedback on your progress. While this might seem like a way to hold things up, the time needed should be built into development workflows.

Even if the customer requests a change to the work done so far, this is going to be much easier to rectify than if it’d been caught later in the process. For example, if a customer needs to change the way a feature works, this is easier to complete before that feature has already been pushed to production and becomes tangled with other functions.

Gain valuable market insight

Your customers will likely interact with the market more regularly than your team. This means they’ll have a deeper understanding of the current landscape and key challenges. Through regular conversations with your customers, you may be able to identify unmet needs, find new opportunities for innovation, or get a competitive edge by spotting emerging trends.

Innovative products aren’t created in a vacuum. They’re created in response to customer requirements, challenges, and pain points. To uncover what the market wants and what will best serve the organizations you work with, it’s important to keep communication open and listen to those evolving needs.

Read our last part: Unlocking Team Potential: Continuous Innovation