What I want to share with you today is agile demand management. When it comes to the importance of demand management, everyone must be able to reach an agreement. The failure of demand management means that the source may have deviated, or it may have no value in the face of rework, spread or delivery. Products, since Agile emphasizes embracing change, isn’t it just what customers want and do? Please remember that hugging is not equal to being casual, nor does it mean that you will become unstructured if you want to change.
The first step is to explore the real needs of customers
Presumably everyone has seen this picture. The pain point of traditional demand management is that the demand needs to pass through multiple teams and roles such as customers, products, project managers, designers, development, testing, operation and maintenance, and business. Distortion, we rely on comprehensive documents to hope to capture the core demands of customers, and the result is that each role strives to do the best, but the delivered product is not what the customer needs, and the most important thing is that it is doomed from the source Failure, because the customer did not express her true needs, or she would not express it at all. In the so-called VUCA era, the uncertainty of demand is more obvious, so our first step is to explore the customer’s Real demand!
Empathy map
An empathy map is also called an empathy map. So who is empathy to whom? Of course, for our customers, when it comes to empathy maps, many of my friends will think of tools and methods such as user portraits, virtual characters, and extreme characters, but in fact, empathy maps and these tools still have different focuses. Yes, for example, virtual characters need us to create a virtual character, not just add a name to the user role. The description of the fictional character should be very sufficient, so that everyone on the team feels that they know the character. The empathy map can be used in conjunction with virtual characters. Use the empathy map to further sort out the customer groups corresponding to the virtual characters you have drawn. In this process, you need to treat yourself as a customer. You must empathize and pay attention. What the customer thinks, says, sees, hears, and does, and what ultimately gets is a full understanding of customer pain points and gains.
For example, if I am an agency selling a house and I want to use empathy maps for my clients, I will analyze how they feel when I lead them to the sales office. What can he see? (The hot atmosphere, the crowded people or the dispute between the customer and the sales office) What can you hear? (My wonderful explanation, hard sales are the complaints and evaluations of other buyers). Through the analysis of the customer, you can understand the impact of the environment on him. Any words he hears may affect his decision and willingness. He sees The scene that arrives will make him anxious or anxious. It is also possible that what he thinks is not consistent with what he said, because he is wary of you, and eventually you will understand the customer’s behavior, and you can understand what the customer wants and the pain points. where is it! This tool seems to be very simple, but the key is that it allows us to truly think from the perspective of the customer. In order to make this tool fully effective in actual use, we need to use the co-creation process. The so-called co-creation is the need The process of teamwork and co-creation, the whole process can be simply summarized into the following steps:
1. Identify user types. Our products may involve multiple types of users, and different users have different feelings, so we do the same Lixin Map should clarify the specific user types, and analyze and organize according to each user type to be more representative and meaningful;
2. Make it clear that the same user will have different feelings and feelings under different scenarios. Action, so our second step is to clarify the use of the scene, combined with the specific analysis of the specific scene, when the team is co-creating, the team can be divided into different groups (or even a group for each person), and each group analyzes a specific scene;
3 , Summarization, classification, classification, no doubt refers to two actions. First, each group can summarize the thoughts, words, views, hearings, and actions empathized with the user, and then summarize them together. The content of the content is de-duplicated, merged, and summarized, and what is left in the end is the "condensed essence";
4. After finishing the previous step, we have the most basic elements, and this step is based on the above The basic elements of distilling users’ pain points and gains, and a final summary of the complete empathy map.
The above is an introduction to the tool of empathy map. When it comes to this, everyone will have a little doubt, empathy map is only helping us to discover the real needs of our customers, so what should we do after we have obtained the real needs? Planning a product that can help customers solve practical problems? Don't sell it, the next tool may be able to solve this problem.
Impact map
The typical problem we encountered when doing product function planning was the mismatch between product goals and functions. To put it bluntly, the functions made could not solve the customer’s problems, and the impact map hopes to link the following aspects of information. To ensure that the output function matches the product goal;
1. Why do we do this, what are the goals we expect to achieve, and what problems do we want to solve? If this problem is clarified, we can know the meaning of what we do, and the basic principles of verifying whether the goal is reasonable can refer to the smart principle;
2. Who will influence the achievement of our goals? Who will hinder the achievement of our goals? Will anyone be affected by this incident? So the second key element refers to the role, which is the role that can influence or be affected by the goal;
3. The role analyzed in the previous step of HOW is how to help us achieve our goals or how to hinder the realization of our goals if it has an impact. The correctness of the impact analysis also directly determines whether the final delivered function is reasonable;
4. WHAT has finally reached the functional part. What kind of functions do we need to build to solve the problem and finally help us achieve our goals;
The impact map is such a simple tool. Through four levels of connections and constraints, the ultimate guarantee is the consistency of goals, roles, influences and functions. Conversely, functions that cannot help us achieve our goals will not appear in the In the impact map, let's not talk too much nonsense or give an example.
This picture is a problem of using impact maps to analyze how to increase sales of Lao Wang’s coffee shop (I only wrote one piece of data for each element in this example, but it is just to quickly explain the impact map, the real impact map The use of is often analyzed from multiple angles), the why part is the core goal of Lao Wang is to increase the sales of coffee shops by 10% in the first quarter, and there are three typical roles analyzed:
- The first type is friends who like to drink coffee like Xiao Zhang, but don’t have much pocket money because his wife is strict;
The second category is like Xiao Li who is a freelancer who likes the atmosphere of a coffee shop, and even sits in a coffee shop every day to do what he likes;
The third type is Xiao Wang who wants to buy a cup of coffee on the way to work. Maybe he has no special requirements on the type of coffee. What he cares more about is getting the coffee quickly so that it will not affect the clocking in to work;
Further analysis is how to influence these roles. For Xiao Zhang, who lacks pocket money, I definitely want to spend less money to buy better coffee, while for Xiao Li, he cares not only about coffee but also Whether the environment is comfortable, and Xiao Wang, what must be required is faster delivery speed, so let's take a look at what we need to do for each type of customer based on the above analysis.
For Xiao Zhang, we need to engage in more promotional activities so that he has more choices and more satisfactory products under the constraints of limited funds;
For Xiao Li, we can consider purchasing a good coffee machine to reduce the noise of coffee making and play more soothing music to create a comfortable environment and atmosphere;
For Xiao Wang, we need to improve the efficiency of coffee making, or add a self-service ordering system;
In this way, in retrospect, are all our efforts serving the goal? Maybe we did not achieve the goal of increasing sales by 10% in the first quarter, but we are confident that our efforts are in the right direction. Yes, we have no waste in terms of lean thinking.
So, through the example above, do you have a deeper understanding of how the movie map can help us achieve our goals?
This article only shares the methods and experience of how to tap the real needs of customers. The next article will talk about demand planning and prioritization.
