Who takes priority? Customers vs. Users

In a B2B software product company, this is a battle our product management team faces daily. To make things worse, our business was built on the back of a re-seller channel.

So, not only do we have to worry about the customer and the user, but we have to worry about the entity selling our products on our behalf. Tricky business. Especially for product development. How in the world do you prioritize?

Well, there's not a straightforward answer, unfortunately, but I'll do my best to break this down. Even if your product organization isn't quite as complex as what we deal with, B2B product development remains extremely complex in a lot of ways and prioritization is challenging.

Take the picture above. Credit to Business Insider for the picture and their associated article: https://www.businessinsider.com/slanted-toilet-design-decrease-phone-social-media-use-bathroom-breaks-2019-12

This picture is from a post I was shown by my friend Dan, a Product Marketing Manager at our company. I thought it was funny, especially in the context of the conversation we were having.

What struck me most was the decisions made in the product development life cycle and the go-to-market strategy behind it. Clearly the customer was who took priority when these "unique" toilets were built.

I'm sure the key features and benefit pitch went something like, "Think of how much more productive your workforce will be if we can get them off their...seat." Business owners might have even calculated the ROI from productivity they would gain back from their workforce, and I'm sure extensive studies were conducted to see how much more than five minutes employees were spending on the toilet.

The problem with this customer-first mentality is the potential impact on the users. Sure, it might seem explicit regarding the intended impact, but that thought process didn't extrapolate very far beyond that one thought.

If your employer is going to make something physically painful for their employees, how many of those employees are going to stay? The very fact that a company would buy this type of product tells a much deeper and more impactful story as to how they view their employees and the culture of that organization.

You might end up spending a lot of money on these "cost-saving" toilets to only lose employees, good employees, and lose more money from turnover costs than you would have from letting your employees take their time in the bathroom.

But does this mean we should develop products for the end-users at the expense of the customer?

No. That wouldn't make any sense, because you have to sell the product to a customer to have a business.

Here's what I'd propose in terms of prioritization for a B2B product:

1) Develop a product that meets a need of a business with a market large enough to sustain a company, new business unit, or new team inside of an existing business

2) Make sure the end-user is kept in mind during development

3) Optimize for on-boarding new businesses

4) Optimize for end-user experience

You need a product that solves a real problem and can be sold. But you have to keep end-users in mind, because if the product isn't usable or is painful (literally or figuratively) to use, then the end-users will rebel, not use it, and the customer will churn.

The product doesn't have to have an amazing user experience (at first), so you should make your first level of optimization target your customer. From the marketing funnel to the on-boarding experience, you're focused on acquisition. The worst thing to experience is churn before the customer ever gets fully on-boarded. So, optimizing for your marketing funnel and your on-boarding process is paramount once you've found product market-fit and can accelerate and scale your customer acquisition strategy.

Keeping customers happy buys you enough time to receive and digest feedback from your support team on how the end-users perceive your product and what the problems are with it. If you've taken care of the customer acquisition and on-boarding experience, you'll have the bandwidth to put focus on the end-user experience.

Customers will buy you a little time, because switching costs are high, and it's sometimes more painful to go through the buying process than keeping a product that isn't providing a great experience to the employees.

But don't count on this holding true for long. Eventually, there will be enough individuals with the political clout to influence change and the decision maker will be forced to go looking for another product.

That's why end-user experience must be an immediate focus after optimizing for the acquisition and on-boarding experience.

Going back to step 1, the better the job you did keeping end users in mind when developing the product initially will increase the runway you have between optimizing for acquisition and on-boarding to when it becomes vital to have an optimized end-user experience. But at some point, sooner than later, you have to get to that place where end-users have a seamless experience with your product.

If you can acquire and on-board customers easily and the end-users can easily adopt your product as part of their daily routine, then habits will be built that become deeply ingrained into that organization. Once that happens, Customer Lifetime Value will increase exponentially, Net Promoter Scores will be high, and word of mouth might become the only acquisition strategy you need to see continued growth.

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