Why won’t they buy my amazing product?

Because you have built it for yourself, not for your customer’s needs!

As a product creator in the Edtech world, you may be eager to jump right into the development phase and bring your ideas to life. However, skipping the discovery phase can lead to serious problems down the line. In this post, we’ll explore why the discovery phase is so important and how it can help you create commercial products that truly meet the needs of schools and MATs.

The discovery phase is all about understanding whom you are building the solution for and understanding their needs and not wants. It involves conducting research, gathering insights, and validating assumptions to ensure that you are on the right track. Skipping this phase means that you are creating a product based on assumptions (even if you have been in the role) rather than actual data, which can lead to costly mistakes.

One of the main benefits of the discovery phase is that it helps you get under the skin of your target customer. This includes understanding their pain points, needs, and desires. By gathering this information, you can create a product that meets and solves their needs. This can lead to higher customer satisfaction and increased loyalty over time.

Additionally, the discovery phase can help you identify opportunities for innovation. By exploring the Education market and gathering insights, you may discover a gap that your product can fill. This can lead to a unique product that stands out from competitors and has the potential to generate significant revenue.

Furthermore, the discovery phase can help you save time and money in the long run. By identifying potential issues early on in the process, you can avoid costly mistakes down the line. For example, if you discover that there is little demand for your product, you can pivot early on before investing significant resources into development.

To conclude, the discovery phase is a crucial part of product creation that should not be skipped. By conducting research, gathering insights, and validating assumptions, you can create a product that truly meets the needs of schools and MATs. The discovery phase can also help you identify opportunities for innovation, save time and money, and avoid costly mistakes. By prioritizing the discovery phase, you can set your product up for success and positively impact your customers and your bottom line.

We’ve just finished a brilliant week delivering product training in New York with the Tarigo Product Management team.

The week involved delivering an intensive Product Bootcamp based around Tarigo’s 5D Product Framework. It’s an externally accredited, comprehensive course covering all aspects of product management and the typical lifecycle of a product, from ideation right through to product retirement. It’s also fun, practical and engaging, and involves completing group ‘missions’ every day.

As much as this week has been about training and coaching, we’ve learnt so much from spending time with the new team of employees comprised of fairly recent graduates/interns:

👉 The teams collaborated so easily and so successfully. The discussions were intelligent and respectful, roles were assigned fairly and everyone played an important part – and the results were amazing.

👉 The ideas, plans and pitches they came up with within a short amount of time were incredible. It goes to show that, with the right guidance, coaching and templates, innovative ideas can be formulated in a matter of hours and days. It only takes months to get a business case on the table if you allow it to take that long (something that we’re all a bit guilty of, perfectionism is just procrastination in disguise after all).

👉 Gen Z won’t stand for greenwashing. One of the overall goals was to come up with solutions focused on sustainability – and they expect companies to truly live their values. Inspiring stuff.

A fantastic week, I look forward to doing it again. Now for some sightseeing! 🗽

I have now been working with a number of companies across the Edtech market for over 18 years. The one thing that always inspires me is the innovative, engaging companies that want to get it right.

However, there are a number of companies that just do not understand the Education market.  And so, while they may have a great solution, they are not really working on their Product Strategy and how they need to adapt to a market where relationships and advocates are essential to strong growth and success.

The Education market is unique in many ways to other private sector markets and as an Edtech company you need to be able to talk the right language and work in a slightly different way. If I was a MAT or a school there should be 3 key things I would be looking for in a company, never mind the solution they are selling to me.

Relationship

Does this company want to work in partnership?  This means not going missing, once you have sold to a school or MAT.

A School is an exceedingly busy place with lots of challenging priorities for peoples time. The person in the office could be putting a plaster on a knee one minute and then dealing with the police on a bullying incident the next. But ultimately the children come first, not embedding a solution. A school needs support throughout this process and then ongoing support with new functionality and getting the most out of a solution.

Just because a school is paying for a solution doesn’t mean they are using it, eventually a school will stop paying and never go back. As a company stay in touch, help out!!

Also there are companies that can add support which are local to schools, engage with them to help make the most of a solution.

What the solution does now

Many schools don’t have the time to do an audit on their solutions, but I suggest they should. Remember, a solution is there to support a need.

Schools should look at their own processes and ask the question:

• Can this be done better via a technical solution or by a different solution?
• Are my incumbent solutions really meeting our needs anymore?
• Are our needs the same as a bigger school down the road? if not consider looking at lighter solutions or a reduction in cost due to the amount of the solution you are using.
• For the need that the solution meets, is the cost acceptable, is there an alternative?

Needs change along with your ambitions, so should companies to meet your needs.

The Future

Technology and challenges in schools are changing at a rapid pace. As a school or MAT you need to be comfortable that the Edtech partners you have are able to rise to this challenge.

To this end, I would be asking the companies you are working with for a view on their vision. Where they see the Edtech market moving towards, and how they are going to meet these future challenges for schools and MATs.

Gain an understanding of are they nimble or slow, will they let you down in the future? Will they listen to you and help find solutions to your needs in the future?

I am sure there are many other things a school or MAT is looking for in a company, when they are dealing with them, let me have your thoughts?

In Systems engineering and Requirements engineering, a Non-Functional Requirement (NFR) is a requirement that specifies criteria that can be used to judge the operation of a system, rather than specific behaviours. Previously this would be mainly Architecture of the system. For example: Scalability, Accessibility, Capacity. These are all still important, however, it should be about more than this in a SaaS world!

Why do I think this is far more important then ever to get right? From an Architecture perspective, you need to get this right or you will have heavy costs fixing issues in the future. But more importantly you should be setting out to the business what are your expectations of the overall customer experience. You have to remember that software is not a solution on its own, everything from the purchasing journey to the training journey and how you are going to support your customers, are also part of the overall solution, and getting this right will retain customer loyalty.

When thinking of your NFR, think about the experience you want your customers to have and draw out all these journeys, so that every area of the business is aware of their responsibility.  Some questions to ask are:

• Are we going to offer free trials? If so, how are we going to support them? What do we need from development, sales, pre-sales, marketing?
• What is the work flow for customers to purchase? Do we have Account Managers selling? Are we expecting customers to purchase from a portal? Who across the business needs to be involved?
• Are we going to do all training online? Will this be self service? Do we have partners who need to train the software? Are we going to sell the environments?  Who across the business needs to be involved?
• How are we going to support our customers, once they are trained and on-board?

There are many more questions, but all of them will have a potential impact on the overall solution (incl. Architecture) and customer satisfaction. Once you have been through this exercise, most NFRs will be the same for subsequent solutions. But always review the NFRs and learn how you can make the solution better.

Question:            When do you start to launch your solution?

Answer:                 As soon as you can.

Remember you are delivering a solution not just software.  A lot of companies make the mistake that they are purely building software and as soon as the software is ready, then they can release.

But the solution is greater than just the software, it is making sure your business and wrap around services are ready as well. This includes:

• Training materials
• Consultants prepared
• Ordering process tried and tested
• Marketing campaigns understood and ready to action. Advocates ready to help with communication, organise your PR
• Sales enablement complete and sales teams trained
• Support Desk trained and the SLA’s (Service Level agreements) and OLA’s (Operational Level Agreements) are in place
• Software ready. Are you going to trial/pilot?
• Solution feedback mechanisms are in place
• All teams are trained and ready to answer customer queries and evangelise about the solution, using the right value proposition

As soon as you have had the approval for the project to go ahead, and you have secured the budget for development, next step is bringing together your stakeholder group from around the company.  They will help you launch internally and to their peers.

Build a checklist of all the activities and add owners from the stakeholder group.  Have the stakeholders keep you updated with the current progress of their actions, you are not to deliver on their behalf!! The success of the solution will depend on the support of the business, so make sure you have it!

“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” Jurassic Park, 1993

Sound business advice there. Just because you can build it, it doesn’t mean you should.

So why do so many tech companies go all Jurassic Park on us and stuff their solutions with things their users really don’t want or need?

I see it happen a lot in my industry – the Edtech sector – ultimately to the detriment of the company and their clients. If you want to avoid this pitfall keep these 3 things in mind with everything you develop:

1. Keep it simple to begin with and create a product which deals with a specific Big Problem
2. Keep focus but keep iterating, all the while solving bigger, related problems
3. Constantly refer back to the vision of the Big Problem that will be solved. If it doesn’t help don’t do it!

One of the key responsibilities of a Product Manager is communication.  Not only being the voice of the customer within the business but helping shape the overall solution from the product to the wrap around services.  Product Managers also need to be able to communicate to the market on behalf of the company as to the direction the Product is travelling in.

One tool for doing this is the Product Roadmap; traditionally this has been a high level visual representation outlining all the features that you want to deliver and by when. Your confidence levels were dependent on how close in time the release was, which meant any features due in 1-2 years time did not inspire the same confidence.

Here are a couple of suggested ways to build your Roadmap and give you and your customers more confidence:

1. Focus on objectives – An alternative way of communicating a roadmap is rather than focusing on features, set out the objective of what the features you are delivering are going to meet, along with how you are going to measure these objectives. This is a good way to communicate to your customers what your goal for each release is, yet at the same time giving you the flexibility to change the best way to meet the objective. One of the positives of working in an agile environment is that you can learn as you go along and change direction quickly, with little impact on the overall delivery of the solution needed by customers. It doesn’t make sense to promise a feature 1-2 years in advance market needs may change but the objective should stay consistent, whatever the solution is. If you are confident of some of the features you are developing you can use these in your roadmap to offer examples of how you are going to meet the objective.
2. Product Strategy and Vision – Before building the Roadmap, make sure you can describe your Product Strategy and that this meets the overall Product/Business vision.  Another reason to use objectives is it should be easier to describe goals from the strategy, rather than just communicating features. When communicating the Roadmap, each individual strategy should be a coherent story, each objective should be building on the previous objective and so on until it fulfils the overall vision. Otherwise ask yourself why you are developing an objective if it doesn’t meet the overall Product Vision for a solution?
3. Keep it simple – It will be easier for your customers to understand if you keep it simple and focus on objectives rather than a long list of features plus also it is easier to update in response to market demands or changes in the overall business vision.  If you have low confidence on the timeframes, then express this in your roadmap, you do not want to be known for not delivering on time.

Do not forget the roadmap is an opportunity to excite your customers, so be imaginative on the design.

We justify our emotional decisions to buy with logical reasons.  So why do so many sales people try to sell complex, high-value solutions to C-suite executives almost exclusively on logic and rational arguments?

Telling your customer that you think your product is great is nowhere near enough.  Extolling the virtues, facts, figures, features and functionality of your solution is simply too much to comprehend, too overwhelming.

To win you need to position your solution as customer-centric.  It has to feel ‘real’ for your customer; they need to know that you understand what’s important to them – you must tap into the unconscious need.

That’s how you beat your competition.

Your greatest marketing and sales tool is customer advocacy. Having others talk about your product is important. And getting them selling the virtues of how your solution will benefit like-minded customers with the same need as themselves is everything!

This approach will drive the strongest growth. If you get it right, you’ll also create a strong bond between you and your customer base going forward. I have never found a greater marketing and sales machine than ‘bought into’ customers: where you have a great relationship and they love the brand and solutions you deliver.

The first and the greatest voice of those customers you want on board are the customers that everyone is looking towards to guide the market. These are your innovators.

If you are entering into an existing market with a new product, gather those innovators together that you know already.

If it is a new market, you are going to have to do some work on segmentation. Start building personas as to what an innovator looks like in this new market, and then start to build relationships. You could offer them an incentive to take a look at your new product before anyone else, get them on the pilot providing feedback, or offer them a years free subscription.

Ultimately if you can get the innovators to understand and start talking about the value of the product you are launching into a market, you will move from the innovator to early adopter phase of the maturity model very quickly. Remember, innovators are generally happy to take a risk on a new solution if they feel it gives them a competitive advantage.

Perfectionism is just Procrastination in disguise . . . and Procrastination will kill a product release stone dead.

You see this happen all the time in software, and unfortunately Edtech is no exception!   Companies aim to only release a 100% perfect product because they fall into one of these traps:

1. They honestly believe they can create an amazing solution through ‘thinking things up’ in their office/bedroom/ivory tower.

What they really need to do is get their solution out into the real world to see if it really meets the customers’ needs.

2.  They’re scared of messing up so spend a lot of time strategizing to try and ensure they don’t fail at all.

The truth is the only way anyone can create an amazing solution is by putting it in front of your customers, getting feedback and learning from it.

The problem is that all this Perfectionism is bad for business.  Waiting and waiting to release what you believe to be the perfect solution simply allows your competitors to gain feedback, make improvements and win your market.  All you need is a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to take to market and an open mind – the customers will tell you exactly what you need to do to create a perfect solution!

Photo by Braydon Anderson on Unsplash