Goal: To define target customers for the purpose of accelerating the potential to delight customers while advancing strategy.

Effective POA highlights the importance of targeting customers through:

• Customer intimacy through relationship building and developing:
  • Personas,
  • Customer journey maps, and empathy maps, and
  • Integrated with intelligent learning reveals groupings.
• Establishing customer groupings that:
  • Organize customer information,
  • Define commonalities and uniqueness of customers that guides segmentation, including
  • Demographic,
  • Geographic,
  • Psychographic, and
  • Behavioural trends.

Influence the

• Design,
• Solution, and
• Marketing and promotional potential.

How POA Helps Target Customers

The Product Owner represents the customer in all things related to product decisions, design, and solutions. In some instances, particularly for internal products, the Product Owner may even be the customer.

By continually asking questions like, "How will this help this customer?", POA Practitioners influence:

• the team,
• prioritize work, and
• refine planning based on the answers.

This targeted customer-centric questioning leads to answers that come through collaboratively measuring:

• What matters,
• Prototyping,
• Observation, and
• Evaluation of feedback.

Effective POA advocates to:

• Keep the customer at the centre of everything,
• Guide activities of the team to build a shared understanding,
• Make prompt decisions, and
• Organize to focus on the target.

Customer Grouping helps to reveal the target customer. It facilitates an understanding of the source of their uniqueness and the importance of it. Using this information to identify patterns and similarities leads to additional considerations for grouping. Stakeholder maps may also reveal key grouping considerations.

Some standard groupings can help to guide and identify the techniques to deepen customer intimacy.

Purposeful customer grouping by considerations that are important to them, could include:

Direct Customer Group	Indirect Customer Group
Customer purchases, uses, or accesses services	Customer enables products or services for their organization, internally or externally
(i.e., utility/phone service, retail, or Insurance).	(i.e., sales department, HR tool, claims processing, online retail purchase fulfillment).

Customer-centric considerations: What is the product or service solving?

Product

Services

Product

Services

Design	Consider everything from Product plus	Consider everything from Direct Customer plus
Functionality	Control	Marketability
Convenience	Options	Speed to market
Experience	Empathy	Ease of insight
Efficiency	Fairness	Reports/Dashboards/Metrics/ROI

Direct Customer Group

Indirect Customer Group

Reliability	Information
Performance	Accessibility
Compatibility

POA Techniques to Target Customers

Agile Extension Techniques

• Personas: Understand the customers better by empathizing with their key pain points and devising solutions to delight them.

BABOK® Guide Techniques

• Interviews: Interacting with specific customers makes it more personal and focuses on the key issues with the customer experience.
• Observation: Passive and active observation helps in developing a deep understanding of customers to discover known and unknown problems a customer may be facing.
• Document Analysis: Analyzing subjective feedback from customers helps to identify unique aspects of customer problems.

Other Techniques

• Empathy Maps: A visual tool to establish a shared understanding of the customer and their experience.
• Customer Journey Map: Understand the pain points and points of delight as the customer interacts with the product.
• Product-Market Fit: Ensure that the product value proposition is defined, delivered, and aligned with target audience needs.
• Value Proposition Canvas: Ensure the features of the products are aligned to what is valuable to customers and discover the target market.

Case Study: Target Customers - Retailer

Background Super C, a leading brick-and-mortar retailer, was an early provider of online ordering, with pickup service at their stores. While their marketing team had significant studies showing that customers were demanding this type of service to avoid lines at the cashier, they were uncertain why this service was not being adopted by their customers at the pace they expected. They enlisted Gary, a Business Analysis Professional that currently supported the retail services division in product management, to determine if this service was indeed valuable to their customer base. Challenge Super C's goal was to increase in-store pickup of products ordered online to 45% over three years. After an initial performance of 25% in the first quarter of offering the service, the numbers dwindled to just below 10%. Marketing continued to highlight cost savings on shipping, convenience, and expanded product offerings to customers. Supply chain had found innovative ways of ensuring that products ordered online could be sourced through the stores, in many cases on the same day the online order was placed. Action To discover why the service was not adopted as anticipated, Gary started with learning how the process worked, to experience the process as a customer. What he found was interesting. Unlike the electronics store he had previously purchased from, at Super C, he was required to: Go inside the store to pick up his order, Park in a crowded lot, and Walk all the way through the store to the customer service centre at the back of the store. The process took more time than it would have taken for him to come in and shop for the item himself. Based on this experience, he decided to use Personas and Customer Journey Maps to analyze the real customer expectations and make recommendations for changes to the process to address the challenge. Based on his analysis, Gary determined that the primary customers interested in the service were in one of two Persona categories: Busy mothers, and Young professionals. Gary visited several Super C stores and interviewed several people who seemed to fit into these Personas to map their Customer Journeys. Outcome He discovered that speed in-and-out of the store was essential to a successful journey. Having to park, enter the store, walk to the back of the store, and then walk back to their car was frustrating for customers, especially considering that product pickup was marketed as a convenient online service. Gary met with the marketing team, who explained that they had hoped the walk through the store would stimulate impulse purchases. They had failed to recognize that much of the convenience of shopping online was the delivery process. Gary recommended: Reserving a special portion of the parking lots at the stores for customer pick-ups. Having store employees hand-deliver the orders to the customers so they did not have to leave their cars. Having a well-marked space near the entrances of the store would further benefit Super C by having advertising for the service, which could lead more customers to adopt it. Super C began a pilot with the focused parking spaces and hand-delivery in certain stores and noticed an almost immediate uptick in adoption. This led to a planned rollout across the company. At the end of the first year of the re-release of the product, about 38% of online sales were being picked up at the stores. Lessons Learned In this scenario, although the initial solution did not require any systematic changes to entice more adoption of the online pickup service, it set the stage for enough adoption to lead to additional changes that could further enhance the customers' journeys. For example, without the persona analysis, Super C may not have learned that one of the characteristics of a young professional was to adopt technology early. This led to: Development of a geo-fencing technology utilizing smartphones that would alert store personnel that the customer had arrived to pick up their items without them even having to call or text the store. Also, to meet the marketing department's desire to include traditional retail marketing to encourage impulse purchasing at check-out, Super C stores': Online shopping platform was enhanced to highlight suggestive sales of additional items based on what was in the customer's online shopping cart. Email alerts confirming customers' orders began including suggested additional items

Product-market fit is when a product is in the right market and can satisfy that market. In other words, that product is in the right place at the right time.

The product-market fit provides a framework for the alignment of customer needs and organizational goals. It anticipates the expected value to the customer and the organization. The product-market fit is an essential tool for communication to:

• Ensure shared understanding across the stakeholders and the delivery team,
• Plan for the
  • Minimal Viable Product (MVP),
  • Minimal Marketable Feature (MMF),
  • Minimal Marketable Release (MMR), or
  • Minimal Marketable Product (MMP), and
• Integrate across the organization.

The product-market fit is measured quantitatively and qualitatively (see Measure What Matters) and revised based on the outcomes of learning.

How POA Helps Product-Market Fit

The product-market fit provides structure to identify the right market for the product. Whether or not the Product Owner was engaged in the early activities of the strategy horizon, they have a strong voice in both the initiative and delivery horizon. When the Product Owner takes on the role, they inherit the product and the evolution of the product-market fit.

POA Practitioners lead collaborative conversations with the team and stakeholders in the development and ongoing revisions to the product- market fit artefact. Through this level of collaboration, the team strengthens their understanding and commitment to impact customers and the organization.

POA Techniques for Product-Market Fit

Agile Extension Techniques

• Value Stream Mapping: Assess the pieces that are valuable for providing a better product-market fit by analyzing the flow of the
  • Product features,
  • Product workflows, or
  • Transactions.

BABOK® Guide Techniques

• Benchmarking and Market Analysis: Understand how customer satisfaction improves over time against the previous product or market benchmarks. Market analysis techniques such as PESTLE, CATWOE, and Porter's 5 Forces can be used to provide an overall context for product- market fit.
• Decision Analysis: Assess a product-market fit under different options to determine the value of alternate outcomes.

Other Techniques

• Problem Definition and Analysis: Ensure the product is continuously aligned to the problem or opportunity by reshaping and framing.
• Product-Market Fit: Product-market fit is an artefact and concept used to summarize the analysis of customer expectation vs. product value propositions. It is observed to determine whether or not there is a disconnect.

The value proposition is a promise of value to be delivered to a customer that is developed from the culmination of:

• Ideas,
• Customer intimacy,
• Market insights,
• Evidence, and
• Design.

The value proposition demonstrates:

Understanding of:	Aligns with:
Customer pains and gains, Jobs to be done.	Pain relievers, Gain creators, and Product benefits.

Value proposition clarifies:

• How the product solves or improves the problem or pain.
• The benefits that the customer can expect.
• Why customers should choose this product over the competitor's product.

The value proposition drives compelling value for customers. It is not a slogan or a positioning statement, which focuses on a narrow benefit aligned to competitive advantage.

Through the value proposition, the customer sees part of the solution, and their interest is piqued.

The value proposition canvas tool helps to ensure that the product or service is positioned around what the customer values and needs. Originally developed by Dr. Alex Osterwalder, it aligns the fit between the product and the market. It feeds the customer segment and value proposition segments of the business model canvas. It provides a visualization that contributes to shared understanding and meaningful conversations.

How POA Helps with Value Proposition

Through alignment to the value proposition, effective POA inspires a value- focused mindset within the team. The team champions this value proposition.

The $100 Test Tool

Using tools like the $100 Test, POA Practitioners create an interesting and fun way to engage with customers or users to validate understanding of value and priority. It can be done with a group, individually or as a fun survey. With this activity, customers get to spend an imaginary $100 on features or options that are presented in a list. Completing this activity with the team and then with customers validates the team's understanding.

POA helps practitioners with:

• Crafting a strong value proposition,
• Making the value proposition canvas more effective, and
• Aligning validation points that contribute to the product-market fit.

POA Techniques for Value Proposition

Agile Extension Techniques

• Job Stories: Used to capture expected value from common activities, transactions, and workflows in a product.
• Value Stream Mapping: Assess the right value proposition by analyzing the:
  • Flow of the product features,
  • Product workflows, or
  • Transactions.

BABOK® Guide Techniques

• Collaborative Games - $100 Test: Participants are asked to spend an imaginary $100 to choose features that are valuable from a customer perspective.

Other Techniques

• Human-Centred Design for Products: Continuously develop and align the product to customer expectations.

Case Study: Value Proposition - Retailer

Background Super C retail stores had locations in the Midwest that also had gas stations and convenience stores on the same property. Super C catered to lower-income shoppers who were looking for bargains. They were introducing a store-branded credit card that could be used at Super C stores, as well as their related gas stations, and convenience stores. Challenge The average person in the United States has four credit cards. However, the average shopper at Super C does not have a traditional credit card because they do not have enough income or a sufficient credit score to secure one. However, they may qualify for a store credit card, which is typically easier to obtain. Super C wanted to: Build shopper loyalty by offering store credit cards, and Grow sales at their gas stations. They believed they could offer a value proposition to customers that would address both needs. Action Product Owner Alicia used a value proposition canvas and focus group feedback provided by the marketing team to make recommendations on how to position the Super C store brand card to customers. Super C customers were particularly interested in the low prices the store offered on all their products. The gas stations, however, had prices per gallon that were in line with other stations in the same areas as the stores. Alicia suggested that Super C stores: Offer five-cents-per-gallon off if a customer used the Super C brand credit card for their gas purchases. The lower cost of gas would attract customers to the Super C stations which would grow the business. Give customers a cash-back bonus after the first $500 purchased with their card. This would build brand loyalty because customers would generally need to make multiple visits and multiple purchases to attain the $500 level to achieve the cash-back reward. In addition, $500 in purchases was a lesser amount than competitors were promoting, so Super C customers would gain the benefit faster. Outcome When the credit card rolled out, Super C noticed: Sales at the gas stations increase, Customers' overall single purchases were higher when using the credit card, and Repeat customer traffic also increased. Feedback from marketing surveys and focus groups indicated that beyond the cash-back bonuses and discounts on gas purchases, customers enjoyed the "prestige" of carrying a credit card, and in turn, wanted to shop more at Super C. Lessons Learned Super C's customers focused on shopping for low prices. Super C learned that paying attention to customer needs, and offering customers something unique, led to increased loyalty.