Aaron is the Chief Technology Officer at Pushpay and specializes in leading teams and industries through digital transformation.
Continuing to innovate as a SaaS company requires the ability to balance the art of delivering the tools and technology your customers need today while proactively anticipating and building toward what they will desire in the future.
While the concept of co-innovation isn’t exactly new, the rigor and business practice around it have become much more advanced in the last decade, encouraging organizations to look beyond their company’s four walls to innovate. Co-innovating with customers directly involves them in product development, making them a stakeholder in the process. Partnering with customers on innovation is an especially powerful tool for developing products and services that closely align with their needs and future desires.
Engaging customers in product innovation takes the guesswork out of understanding their needs, ensuring that innovation responds to their requirements, addresses their pain points and delivers measurable value. We recently expanded capabilities within our product suite at Pushpay in order to address the needs of a new business vertical, and co-creating with some of our current customers was an essential part of our development and innovation strategy.
Benefits Of Co-Innovating With Customers
As you continue to evolve your offerings, it’s important not to innovate in a vacuum. Partnering with customers on product development can accelerate innovation and increase product adoption. That translates to delivering real value to customers faster, which can increase customer satisfaction and boost loyalty.
A survey by Hitachi found that bringing stakeholders like customers directly into the innovation process yields significant bottom-line benefits. Over half (52%) of survey respondents said that a co-creative approach to innovation has reduced the cost of developing products and services in their businesses, 51% said that co-creation has improved financial performance and 61% said that co-creation has created new commercial opportunities.
Partnering with customers does require a high degree of coordination. Getting it right involves bringing the right voices to the table and creating connections that feed into a continuous loop of customer feedback, insight, development tasks, product innovation and customer value. For startups or mid-sized companies that are looking to put some structure and rigor behind a more mature co-innovation approach, here are four steps to get started:
1. Practice Continuous Customer Research: Co-innovating with customers starts with listening. All of our conversations with customers are focused on understanding their needs and pain points. Research interviews are continuous and ongoing, framed against a broad set of topics. They are recorded, cataloged and tagged against customer needs and pain points. All of that data becomes democratized so that product development teams across our organization are able to access the data, learn from it and adjust their product plans. From a tactical perspective, customer-centered organizations need to ensure that they are capturing feedback and sharing it in a way that is transparent and easily accessible.
2. Create A Customer Advisory Board: One of the strategies that can help you quickly gain the above insights is through the development of a customer advisory board. At Pushpay, this board is made up of a small number of our strategic and most influential customers who are critical to our business and growth. We regularly have bigger-picture conversations with this board about how our technology can help them resolve operational challenges and capitalize on opportunities for growth. This advisory board has high expectations related to the role their voice should play in the evolution of our product. They also view their inclusion in our customer advisory board as an indication of how important they are to us as customers. This group is defined in conjunction with our customer service and sales teams and is used across the business for different discovery efforts. As an extension to the advisory board, consider drilling down another level by creating product panels, which could represent specific products, services or technology. As power users, these panel members regularly use a specific area of the software and are more familiar with day-to-day workflows. Engaging with this group enables internal stakeholders to make more informed decisions about how a company should evolve or innovate to better meet their needs.
3. Launch An Internal Product Guild: Beyond investing in internal resourcing to manage the above customer feedback loops and touchpoints, it’s important to define a group of internal leaders to help prioritize the feedback and ideas before development takes place. Like any fast-moving tech company, roadmap prioritization (and re-prioritization) conversations are essential. You can create a product guild to help surface ideas, define product development direction and share about recent product innovations. They are responsible for helping ensure that roadmap items align with business goals and reflect the current needs and future desires of customers. This group should include your head of product, engineering, marketing, customer success and more.
4. Engage Alpha And Beta Customers: Once you are ready for testing and deployment, a healthy pool of alpha and beta customers is essential. They are your sounding board to ensure that what your team has developed is functional and actually solves the intended problem. The alpha group is a smaller group that is open to receiving communication daily through the development process. They have access to an alpha channel, which is essentially a test site that enables two-way communication. They are part of the innovation process every step of the way and are an essential part of our development team. When new products or features are more refined, a larger beta group of customers is engaged for testing—which is pretty standard for most technology companies whether you are rolling out something new internally or externally.
Like most companies, we continue to evolve to ensure these programs work to create transformational solutions that solve real problems and create tangible value for our customers. However, when you have the customer at the center of all of your development decisions, you are forced to remain hyper-focused on creating the right solutions to help them achieve their mission now and into the future.
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