jtbd
customers
stakeholders
users
Users, Stakeholders, and Customers
Aren't these people the same? Interchangeable?
Absolutely not.
This is an all too common misunderstanding by product teams and leaders. They are not the same and should you treat them as interchangeable, you will fail to create meaningful outcomes and impact.
Does it matter these roles aren't the interchangeable when we're building products and services?
It depends, in some cases, some might be interchangeable. For example, in some B2C markets, a user might also be the customer.
In other contexts, no, in B2B, to conflate a user with a customer is a fast path to building and launching the wrong things.
But what of stakeholders?
Creating Shared Language
A product manager or shaper, needs to build a shared and common language so they are able to focus on the right things. It's equally important to share definitions with the team who are building the experiences.
A team where everyone has context of language and definitions will quickly build momentum. A team without these, will struggle to stay afloat, nor will these teams contribute meaningful progress to customers and shareholders.
A user is someone who uses your products/services to accomplish a task or outcome.
They may not define that task or outcome, but they are part of a broader process that the enterprise has designed.
A customer is someone who benefits from the outcome that your product ( or set of products/services) provides.
The customer makes a purchase in order to get their desired outcome.
The customer is who your organization serves, it receives revenue from earning and satisfying a customer. The customers pays everyone's salary, including the CEO and leadership.
Purchasing people, in B2B, are not customers. They can only say 'no', they can not say 'yes'. They do not benefit, nor do they have budget for, your product.
It's best to think of them as 'technical buyers' to use the SPIN Selling terminology, versus the customer being the 'economic buyer'. Only the Customer or Economic Buyer can say 'yes'.
What is a stakeholder? I think it means anyone who has a 'stake' in your product or experience. But what does that even mean?
In large organizations, that could mean anyone who thinks they have a say on what your product is or should be. In some cases, your users are considered stakeholders though we prefer to refer to them as 'users'.
There is an even worse situation where stakeholders are referred to your customers, this is rarely the case. Conflating a stakeholder with a customer is a fast path to failure.
To be fair, there may be innovative ways to fulfill customer needs when working with stakeholders. But product teams do not work for stakeholders, product leaders need to ensure that stakeholders understand their role.
This is where many organizations' product teams go awry.
Two things to do, another thing you may want to do, one to NOT do.
- Define who your customer is. If you are B2B, define your users, and even consider who the 'technical buyers' are.
- Start to organize all your research around the customer and read it all.
- What to do about stakeholders? It is common to create a stakeholder map. You may want to create this. I would definitely prioritize the first two tasks before this. Politics in large companies, might dictate doing this first. This is why most companies are losing.
- Ok, what should you not do? Don't start writing a bunch of job stories ( a reframing of user stories) for the team to start building. Job Stories were created by Alan Klement to shift the focus away from User Stories and more about the context of the Job-to-be-Done. These are helpful when you're trying to reshape your thinking around the customer outcome/Job. But they are a higher level of abstraction than a User Story and we've seen teams start to use them in place of a User Story. That's not what they are for, don't make the mistake.
These are the first steps to becoming truly customer-centric.
I just read a response to a post on LinkedIn where a Doctor with '30 Years Marketing, 25 Years Customer Experience', in other words, a 'thought leader' advise a Poster to not 'push this customer thing too far'. This gave us quite the laugh.
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