One Product to Rule Them All?
How to avoid over-customizing your B2B product
When talking to B2B product leaders about their challenges, one topic keeps popping up across all industries: the constant trade-off between pleasing your customers and not over-customizing your product by going after individual requests. So is there one ring… ehm… product to rule them all?
In one of our last Product Academy Leadership Circles we discussed a couple of strategies that might help:
Make it uncomfortably narrow
First of all, you need to be crystal clear on your actual target group. Or - as my valued peer Nina Schneider, CPO at Sherpany, would put it:
Make it uncomfortably narrow.
Building everything for everyone will come at the risk of losing focus and missing out on your unique value proposition.
Make customers pay for tailored solutions
One way to reduce customization requests or to make working on them worthwhile is putting a price tag on special client requests. Once they have to pay for tailored solutions (via one-off payments or a higher premium), they will think twice as hard about whether or not to ask for them in the first place.
Have customization work done in a separate department
Working on custom integrations or individual solutions will derail your team’s focus from the most important items on your product backlog. That’s why Mario Lenz, CPO at Quentic, is keeping all customization work strictly separated from his product department. A separate team is responsible for development work and maintenance (because let’s be real: maintenance of custom solutions is an overhead often overlooked in naive optimism…). They are using separat tools and APIs for custom integrations to avoid dependencies on the main product, too.
Use a Customer Advisory Board for guided prioritization
Mario has another tip for us: Quentic established Customer Advisory Boards where a pre-selected group of customers is serving as a sounding board for product ideas. Each Customer Advisory Board (they have several Boards for different product areas) is meeting monthly and gets to weigh in with their opinion about new feature ideas. And there is a lovely side effect: When one of the participants brings up an edge case request, other participants often shut it down quite quickly pointing to the most important improvements everyone will benefit from.
(Stay tuned for an article on discovery in B2B where we will deep-dive into ideas like this one :-)
Build for your desired (future) customers, not legacy customers from the past.
We started this article talking about the ideal customer profile. Let’s close it by diving into one common challenge I’ve come across quite a few times - especially when working with startups and companies that are not profitable yet: They acquired some bigger customers in the past when they were still unclear about their actual value proposition and ideal customer profile. In the meantime, they had re-defined their strategy, p.ex. focussing more on self-onboarding users and economies of scale. However, in order to secure their cash-flow, they kept pleasing their existing clients with tailored features and custom integrations which slowed down the process of moving the product and future customer base in the desired strategic direction.
How can you solve this pickle? I guess there is no easy way out - it boils down to a funding challenge. Either you find external investors who can make you more independent from the existing customers or you will most likely have to take a leap of faith…
Special thanks to Jasmine Comi, Mario Lenz, Mario Schwarz, Sascha Kropf and Yves Studer who shared their experience and thoughts with me during our session.
What are your strategies for avoiding over-customization in B2B?
Photo Credit: bonheureux / Flickr