Watch: Module 5 – User Centricity (29:39)

We’ve been doing a lot of introspection, self-analysis and naval-gazing so far in this course. Now that you have refined your search in Assignment #2, it’s time to focus on understanding your customer and the activities you will engage in during your next Loops. Your primary activities at this stage will involve “getting out of the building” to meet with people, build connections and learn from them through life interviews (Tool #6A) and networking (Tool #6B).

As I describe in the video, the entrepreneurial tools and methods you use in Assignment #3 will depend on what your design challenge is and who your potential customers are. If you are looking to find a job, your customers are potential employers and the social capital networks to reach them. If you are seeking to be more intrapreneurial within an existing job, then your customers are your employer’s customers as well as relevant stakeholders within your company. If you want to freelance/consult or start a side-hustle, then you will have multiple customers using either a B2C, online B2C, or B2B relationship. In the video I describe which set of entrepreneurial methods and tools to use for each of these four major categories of customer. Regardless of which career-related design challenges you are now pursuing, the Entrepreneurial Principle of User Centricity will help guide whichever specific set of entrepreneurial methods or tools you are using (e.g. qualitative design thinking, quantitative lean startup, VPD, D4G, 100Steps2Startup, 24 steps of Disciplined Entrepreneurship).

Design thinking is often referred to as human-centric innovation which includes human-computer interfaces, usability, interface design, customer discovery and other associated fields. The core to all this is entrepreneurial Principle #4 – User-Centricity. This sounds pretty obvious, but it is shocking how frequently the customer is forgotten or their problems/needs not placed firmly at the centre of all design decisions. Traditional marketers want to advertise their products rather than understand what their customers actually want. Job-seekers send the same resumes to potential employers with drastically different job advertisements. Inventors come up with new gadgets and products that don’t really solve a problem. Entrepreneurs believe in their ideas, rush to build the proverbial “better mousetrap” and expect the world to rush to buy it (“If you build it, they will come”). Conscious application of the principle of user-centricity will help you avoid this common failure sometimes known as “technology push over market pull”.

You need to get out there and meet with people using tools like Tool #6A (Life Interviewing) and Tool #6B (NetWORKING).

This does not mean that you can expect your potential customer to know what they need or be clear or consistent about their problems. But it does mean that you should clearly address the problems that human beings have before coming up with solutions. It often takes a lot of work to “walk a mile in their shoes” and develop empathy and deep understanding of the problem. That means you need a double-diamond approach. It starts with understanding the problems of real people. For example, any project or company designed to “solve the problem of food waste” or “attack climate change” has dropped the issue of just which human being has the problem of food waste or climate change. The planet may have a problem with climate change, but planets don’t buy things or make decisions. The planet cannot be your customer (neither can a company – only specific individuals or key stakeholders within the company have problems and can make buying decisions). That’s one important reason why the problem of climate change is so difficult to solve – it really is not any one person’s problem (or company or country). It’s kind of nobody’s problem, which makes it everybody’s problem. The planet doesn’t care – in fact it wants to kill us with malaria, zika virus, snakes and smallpox. Just staying alive is hard work!

Design thinking addresses this issue by starting with people. Why do individuals or companies or farmers throw away food in the first place? Does this cost them money? Do they feel bad? Why did they grow or buy too much? Once you start to look at the problem through their eyes you may discover that it’s not a problem for them at all, or is insignificant compared to their other problems, which is why they do it. Simply telling people not to throw away food, or offering to take it off their hands, or getting them to change their habits may not work. The farmer may not want to sell their “ugly fruit” at a reduced price and prefer for it to rot in the field rather than undercut their prices. Parents may not care about throwing away $30 of food per month because they are more concerned about trying to get their kids to try food they may not like, or they prefer to buy too much rather than run out of food while one of them is too busy to go shopping that day. Or maybe supermarkets are just too good at inducing them to buy more than what’s on their shopping list. Restaurants may also buy too much food and prefer to throw some away rather than run the risk of running out of a popular item on a busy night. Perhaps their actual problem is inventory prediction and control rather than food waste.

Trying to come up with a solution before you fully understand the human-centric problem often just doesn’t work very well. The same thing is true of finding a job. Simply asking a company to hire you (your solution) and explaining how awesome and impressive you are (with your resume) may not work as well as first trying to discover what their needs are. Once you understand what their problem is, you can better pitch how you can help them solve it (including your USP and highly-customized resume to highlight the things you can do for them).

That’s why all the major entrepreneurship methods include several Diamond/Loop/Iterations. VPD uses one Iteration to create the Customer Profile Canvas, another to fill in the Value Proposition Canvas, and then uses Iterative Loops in the Lean Learning Process to test each aspect of the Business Model Canvas (see VPD pgs. 198-199). D4G uses four iterative loops (What is, What if, What wows, and What works). Discipline Entrepreneurship uses 24 steps with each step comprising a single Diamond/Loop. Sean Wise’s 100Steps2Startup has broken the process down into 100 steps.

In ECLD Module 5 – User-Centricity, I describe four different kinds of potential customers and the major important books, thought-leaders and methods used for each. I also describe a variety of tools that arise from these different methods and empower you to understand the literature to learn more about them. In addition to all the useful tools in the literature, I also provide you with a few more customized videos that I created because I thought they would be particularly important for this course and assignment: ECLD Tool #5 – Customer Persona, Tool #6A – Interviewing and Tool #6B – NetWORKING.

You are bound to get frustrated as you work through the various tools in the double-diamond to resolve your design challenges, so I also provide a video for Tool #7 – Re-Framing Failure, Anti-Fragility and Growth Mindset.

It all starts with understanding your customer. Even within any one of the four major categories I describe, individual people are very different from each other, so if you try to cast your net too broadly, you get contradictory information and rapidly become confused. Everyone tells you something different about their problems and you end up nowhere. In fact, instead of trying to please everyone (you probably can’t), you should seek to reduce your number of potential customers and become increasingly specific with each Loop!

That’s where I find Bill Aulet’s Holy Grail of Specificity to be so helpful (from “Disciplined Entrepreneurship”). Break your potential customers (or employers) down into smaller and smaller market segments with each Iteration/Loop. You may have an interest in fashion, but that’s a multi-billion-dollar industry and just too broad to get your mind around. You can break that down into clothing, brands, beauty…. And you can segment that further by potential job function such as being involved in purchasing, retail, product design, marketing, sustainability….

Keep doing increasingly specific Loops until you can pick a beachhead market (your first and hopefully most important customer segment that is small enough for you to figure out and approach) and then you can use ECLD Tool#5 – Customer Persona to help further guide and refine your search.

Tool #5: Getting to Know Your Customers & Customer Personas

Watch and Use Tool #5 – Customer Personas (25:16)

It will take you several iterations to really get this tool right. Your first iteration will be too vague because you will probably find you don’t know your target customer as well as you would like once you start to look closely. You will also probably get the first beachhead market segment wrong too. That’s OK, it is supposed to capture insights that ONLY you know and when you are starting out you won’t have any yet.

In the beginning you’ll likely have to create your customer persona “out of thin air” – meaning that you’ll just have to make it up out of your own imagination. That’s OK for a first attempt, but don’t lie to yourself and act like your fantasy persona is even close to being accurate. Your job is not to try to fool your professor into thinking you nailed this. Be humble and use a beginner’s mind to recognize that you probably will be miles off the target when you first start. Otherwise, your confirmation bias will step in and you’ll stop learning new things.

That’s why I decided to give you a few customer personas based on my personal experience as founder and CEO of 3DNA Corp in the early 2000s. It took us a long time to figure out what the right market segment was and which customers in this segment we should focus on. Our initial persona was as vague as “a head of sales within a hardware company” or “an avid video gamer”, but after meeting with dozens and dozens of these people (and pivoting) we were able to really focus our attention on more detailed and accurate personas such as I describe in the video.

Each of the dozen books and methods I describe in the videos will give you their own approach to creating a customer persona. There’s also a lot of online content you can easily find about how to create one. Please be warned that some of these are far too superficial and/or arise out of planning-based mindsets and, frankly, can be garbage. Your persona should give you a guide to action on how to reach them. Personas based on demographics (e.g. age, gender, income) are often of low value. Always ask yourself the question, “How does this customer persona help me find and understand these people?” If you find that your persona is useless, don’t blame the tool. It means you still have too superficial an understanding of your customer.

The ideal customer persona does not come out of your own head. It arises organically from the actual interviews you have conducted and the actual people you have spoken with. You may start with a handful of fantasy personas, but once you start to meet with real people, capture your interviews with post-it notes, and start to look for patterns, you will find that your persona arises from patterns in the data and not from your own imagination. That’s when the customer persona starts to become an important tool in your toolkit!

Tool #5 – Customer Personas Step-by-Step Review

Start with your Career-Related Design Challenge and Use a Mind-Map on your own and/or Brainstorm with your Design Team (Tool # 8A) Potential Market Segments (employers, customers, users… it depends on your challenge) in harmony with your design challenge. Try to come up with at least 20 different market segments. In this divergent phase you are seeking quantity over quality.

Use an appropriate convergent thinking tool and Select a Primary Beachhead Customer Segment. You could, for example, use a 2×2 matrix of exciting to you vs ease of contacting. You can do this in a single step or use two steps as suggested by Bill in his Holy Grail of Specificity in “Disciplined Entrepreneurship”.

Once you select your Beachhead Segment, use divergent thinking tools like Mind-Map or Brainstorming to Identify Your First 10 Customers.

Create a couple of draft fantasy Customer Personas based on these customers. Try to be specific and include enough details that your personas give you a good sample of the potential range of differences. Don’t fall in love with your fantasy personas.

Reach out and start life interviewing real people from your list (don’t ask for a job) just ask to understand them and their needs and problems. This is covered in ECLD Tool #6A.

Capture your interviews using Post-It Notes and use any insights to further refine and iterate your Customer Persona over time.

Capture the Learning and post to D2L.

Document Your Process (e.g. Take Photos of Your Work). Be sure to include a section in your report such as “So What?” or “Insights I Gained” or “What I Learned by Using this Tool”.

Upload Your Work to D2L at least 24 hours before class if you would like Public Feedback (Please Note that You Must Agree to Open Access Sharing for such Feedback)

Tool #6A: Life Interviewing and Prototype Experiences

Watch and Use Tool #6A – Interviewing & Prototype Experiences (15:23)

Watch: Tool #6B – NetWORKING Before COVID (15:59)

Read: Talking to Humans

This is an ongoing assignment that will last throughout the remainder of this course and continue until you accomplish your design challenge or replace it with another more urgent or important one. The purpose is to discover what a career might look like within your fields of interest. You’re not interested in just getting the first job with the first person you meet. You are trying to establish empathy and understanding and ask a lot of questions to experience what the other person’s life looks like. It helps if you know what assumptions you are trying to test and what questions you want to ask before the meeting.

You probably don’t even want to mention the word ‘interview’ to make sure the other person doesn’t get the wrong idea. If they think it’s a job interview, the entire tone will change and they will start to ask you more questions and perhaps become a bit promotional (or turn down the interview request entirely because they don’t have any openings). Before you wrap up the interview, be sure to ask your interviewee if they can introduce you to others who may have other perspectives. You may want to ask to speak with someone who is more junior or earlier in their career or potentially someone more senior with more experience.

If you like what you hear and want to dig deeper, you should consider prototyping what an actual work experience within your career of interest would be like. I list a number of these in the video and also describe “simulating” aspects of the career (like standing for 8 hours, travelling, working with children). “The best way to experience an experience is to experience it.” Try describing a roller coaster experience to someone who’s never been on one.

Tool #6A – Life Interviewing Step-by-Step Review

1. Start with your Primary Design Challenge and Use a Mind-Map on your own and/or Brainstorm with your Design Team potential Assumptions you would like to test. Try to come up with at least 10 different Assumptions.
2. Use an appropriate convergent thinking tool and select your top Assumptions.
3. Now do another divergent thinking phase to brainstorm or mind-map potential interviewees. You can start directly with specific individuals you already know from within your network or you can start with categories of companies, industries and job titles for the kind of people you would like to reach out to. You may need to use Linked In or other online research to help you with this phase. Try to come up with a range of diverse people who might have different perspectives.
4. Use an appropriate convergent thinking tool and select which potential interviewees you would like to meet with to help you address your assumptions.
5. Finally, do another divergent thinking phase to brainstorm or mind-map potential questions.
6. Create a table to help you prepare for your interviews. The first column should be your list of assumptions, the second column should be your potential interviewees and the third column should be your list of questions for each interviewee. You may want to add another column for how you plan to reach your interviewees (what Social Capital connections you have).
7. Reach out and start interviewing people.
8. Capture your life interviews with plenty of notes. You may want to use your table to help you organize your notes. Use Post-It Notes to capture any insights to further refine and iterate your Customer Persona, assumptions and questions. Identify additional interviewees you are able to contact.
9. Document Your Process (e.g. Take Photos of Your Work). Be sure to include a section in your report such as “So What?” or “Insights I Gained” or “What I Learned by Using this Tool”.

Upload Your Work to D2L at least 24 hours before class if you would like Public Feedback (Please Note that You Must Agree to Open Access Sharing for such Feedback)