(2017-02-25) Cagan Focus On Value

Martin Cagan on the need to Focus on (Compelling) Value

I see so many teams focus their discovery work on usability or engineering. Specifically, addressing user confusion, or addressing performance or reliability issues. Now, I’m not arguing that usability or reliability is not important. I am arguing that for many products, this work is analogous to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

I say that because what’s really going on is not that the user struggles to get through a work flow, or gets frustrated by a bug or the performance of an operation. What’s really going on is that the user doesn’t see why they should use the app in the first place. They don’t see the (Compelling) value.

Now I have seen teams report up to management: “the problem is that our customer’s don’t want that feature” or “don’t want to use the app.” While that may be true, and you may need to show that, that’s not especially helpful. Our job is to discover what would make this valuable, so the users choose to use the app