413: The Key to Successful VOC in Agile Teams – with Kristyn Corrigan

How product managers can go beyond the obvious in VOC

PDMA invited me to their conference, which was in Orlando, Florida, to interview some of their speakers. This speaker spoke on The Key to Successful Voice of the Customer (VOC) in Agile Teams.

This episode is sponsored by PDMA, the Product Development and Management Association. PDMA is a global community of professional members whose skills, expertise and experience power the most recognized and respected innovative companies in the world. PDMA is also the longest-running professional association for product managers, leaders, and innovators, having started in 1976. I have enjoyed being a member of PDMA for more than a decade, finding their resources and network very valuable. Learn more about them at PDMA.org.

Agile teams need to know what they are developing, and VOC is a tool for understanding what customers need. However, traditional VOC doesn’t meld well with development accomplished in a series of sprints. We’ll discuss how to get more benefits from VOC in Agile teams.

We are with Kristyn Corrigan. Kristyn is a principal and co-owner of Applied Marketing Science, a Boston-based market research consultancy that helps companies develop better products and services through harnessing the power of customer insights. She specializes in helping companies understand stated and latent customer needs through in-depth interviewing and ethnographic observation. She also trains companies to create and implement their own in-house Voice of the Customer programs.

Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers

[2:38] What is Voice of the Customer (VOC)?

There’s a temptation to think of VOC as any type of customer data, but when we think about VOC in a more systematic sense and fueling product development and innovation, we’re thinking about an in-depth understanding of customer needs. What is the customer trying to accomplish? What is the job to be done? What problems are our customers looking to solve? What things are important to them that the market isn’t currently delivering on? Effective VOC is understanding your customers in an in-depth way and getting beyond the obvious.

[5:50] Can you talk about the friction that happens with VOC and time-box sprints?

Systematic voice of the customer is uncovering a complete set of customer needs that are prioritized by customers. Ideally, this process happens as early as possible in the stage-gate process, but it takes months and months to accomplish. That is in direct conflict with Agile teams’ working on tight timeframes and constantly iterating. These Agile teams might already have a product concept or prototype and still need customer insights. How can we infuse VOC into those moments and get meaningful customer insights? The aim is to be able to fail quickly. To do this, we need three pillars.

[7:34] Tell us about the three pillars of using VOC with Agile.

The first pillar is planning. The first part of planning is answering the question, “Who are the types of customers we really need to get feedback from?” The second part is figuring out what you’re going to have customers react to, which is the minimum viable stimulus. You want to show customers something that’s really easy to change. Don’t be too attached to a prototype.

The second pillar is asking the right questions to get beyond the obvious and get the information we need. Showing the customer a minimum viable stimulus and asking, “Would you purchase this product?” gets us a yes or no answer and does nothing for the development or optimization of the product. Instead, we want to understand why or why not the concept or prototype is appealing. We want to dig deeper to understand the individual features of the concept or prototype, what’s most appealing,