The silent forces blocking a winning product strategy

Today, we’re looking at three stealthy strategy blockers, noting that they’re especially dangerous for large organizations, where a deep understanding of customers at scale has become the only way to win.

These barriers show that without centralized insights—backed by a real-time customer insights hub for the entire team—it's really hard to get it right. Some of your most valuable insights risk fading into obscurity and fundamentally undermining an otherwise winning product strategy. 

So the question is, how many of these pitfalls sound uncomfortably familiar?

1. Not enough team members talking to customers

Understanding the challenges caused by a lack of customer engagement and siloed data is essential to addressing the root of misaligned strategies. Let's dive into how these disconnects contribute to missed opportunities and how a customer insights hub bridges the gap.

The invisible disconnect

Naturally, some team members aren’t engaging with customers as often as their peers or have some degree of separation from the front line—perhaps your product managers or execs? So, how will they recognize it if they’re leaning too heavily on second-hand data rather than accessing direct user insights? When you want to understand what your customers need, what they value, or what problems they are having, there is nothing like hearing it directly from them. And when you're a few degrees removed from the teams actually talking to customers, that disconnect puts you at a great disadvantage when it comes to planning what to build next.

Siloed insights, not helping anyone

Your company’s customer data might be scattered across various departments or tools—think Salesforce, Notion, Google Docs, Zendesk, SurveyMonkey, and more—laddering up to a pretty disorganized situation and significant blind spots. Some might reason that these silos are insurmountable for compliance reasons. And it’s true: troves of customer data can’t just be rolled out for anyone or in any old database. So, friction pops up between customer insights and the people who need them. Collaboration falls flat because decisions are made based on incomplete, siloed data. Meanwhile, designers, developers, engineers, and even product managers might be going along, imagining they’ve nailed customer-centricity. After all, they’ve integrated the user research that is available to them.

The missed opportunity pile-up

Things further unravel as customer needs start going unnoticed or get incorrectly prioritized. Strategies slowly and dangerously go astray without anyone realizing it until it’s too late—your competitive edge is gone. Picture emerging user trends overlooked or pricing adjustments that might’ve increased conversion but didn’t. How about the newest feedback survey failing to capture the most relevant data? Meanwhile, the customer service team knew about these grievances for months—if only someone had captured and shared these issues.

Breaking down silos

A centralized customer insights hub like Dovetail can break down these silos by giving every team member access to up-to-the-minute research. Everyone arrives at a shared understanding of customer pain points, fuelling quick decision-making (well before any limited or skewed understanding gathers momentum). And in industries where compliance is a top issue, Dovetail's magic redact—a feature that protects customer privacy by removing sensitive data from transcripts or blurring video clips—will feel nothing short of waving a wand over any compliance or security worries (aka, HIPAA, GDPR, and SOC 2 Type II).

2. Focusing on loud problems, not the right problems

It’s easy to get mired in squeaky wheel issues, but failing to prioritize the correct problems is often costly. Here’s how focusing on short-term noise detracts from addressing the more profound challenges that truly shape product success.

Noise and urgency vs. importance

Again, getting distracted by the loudest problems, such as customer complaints or operational issues, is understandable. Yet, if it’s a chronic issue, this might mean that critical (perhaps quieter) problems that affect long-term success worsen. For instance, a confusing UI that isn’t just mildly annoying but, over time, genuinely contributes to churn. Dovetail’s lead product designer, Sarah Burton, has some great advice on how to sleuth out and catch dangerous distractions before they put a massive dent in your profitability.

Too much firefighting, not enough strategy

When your team continually reacts to the loudest issues, it’s easy to lose focus on strategic, data-backed priorities—not-so-insignificant things like UX improvements, feature development, performance optimization, roadmapping, cross-functional collaboration, risk assessment, and goal-setting. 

Long term misalignment

The product may feel on track now but gradually fails to resonate with the market as the real problems get bypassed. For instance, users continually express frustration over an unintuitive navigation system, but the team focuses mainly on minor visual adjustments. This approach could result in user attrition, leading to long-term damage to brand reputation and revenue.

Dovetail brings the right problems into focus, fast

With Dovetail, you’ll quickly and deeply understand customer problems, enabling you to validate that you’re focusing on impactful issues and not just reacting to the loudest ones. With Channels, Dovetail automatically turns thousands of inputs of customer data into themes and instant insights, and creates a single, data-backed source of truth for the problems that matter most. You can easily communicate insights to stakeholders as you discover them, empowering your org with the knowledge they need to develop the right products and features that solve customer problems, not create them.

3. Failing to embrace a Day 1 mindset

The “Day 1” mentality refers to the enthusiasm and adaptability seen when launching a product. It's about maintaining the same level of customer-centricity and innovation as you did on your first day in business. However, this mindset might stagnate as the business matures, causing teams to cling to outdated practices. For instance, a company that once thrived on quick iterations may become bogged down in bureaucracy, failing to implement essential updates based on changing customer feedback. To remain relevant, product teams must constantly invigorate their understanding of user needs through ongoing research, testing, and feedback loops.

Assumptions quietly rotting your strategy

Running with outdated assumptions without continually updating them based on new user research leads to stagnation. Your teams might believe they know their customers, but market conditions and user needs evolve. Rapidly.

Erring on the side of comfort, not innovation

Sticking to old methods or data is human nature because it feels familiar and safe. But this is just a false sense of security. If this tendency persists long enough, it may feel deeply ingrained in the company culture and make it harder to accept that customer needs have changed, and you have to too.

Erosion of product-market fit

Imagine a SaaS company with a project management tool that initially thrived by targeting creative teams with features tailored to their specific workflows. However, as the market evolved, new competitors began offering more comprehensive integrations with tools used in finance and IT. Yet, the company continues to build features for its original audience, neglecting the growing needs of users in other industries. This team notices an uptick in support tickets mentioning missing features, and user growth stagnates. Leads are not converting because they go to competitors who have the features they want. And the downward spiral begins.

Dovetail keeps your strategy evolving with continuous customer learning

Dovetail gives teams a simple way to continuously learn from all their customer feedback, as it comes in. The newly launched Ask Dovetail is a semantic search engine that unlocks a whole new way for everyone in the org to learn from all the data in your customer insights hub. Accessible right from Slack or Microsoft teams, Ask Dovetail lets everyone ask questions and get immediate AI-powered insights in return. This means you can learn from all existing knowledge, and evolve your product strategy as quickly as your customers' changing needs.

Building a strategy that won’t stagnate

As with most areas of life, never assume you have all the answers. Even the most established companies can stagnate if they fail to iterate or update their offerings based on evolving user needs. Agility goes beyond reacting to immediate issues; it involves adapting as customer expectations evolve. 

Continuous customer learning is the secret ingredient for designing the experiences that customers want. It's exceptionally challenging for large organizations to understand customers without an insights hub. Without one, it's easy for teams to make product decisions based on outdated, incomplete, or fragmented information. A centralized insights hub like Dovetail keeps teams connected to customers and iterating on the product in the most meaningful ways.