Product management, together with engineering and sales decides on a feature list and have a prioritization workshop. They talk about what they heard from the customers and how complicated it would be to ship the requested features. Does this sound familiar?
As a designer you might wonder how do all these features bubble up to a vision for the customer. I was precisely in this situation, after the success of Trados Studio (see Service Design) and Trados Groupshare (see User-centered ROI), when I first got invited to a yearly prioritization event.
At that moment, as an organization, we already understood our key customer profiles because we had observed them as they were carrying out their daily jobs. We had aligned on their core needs, pains and how they work together. So I brought all those artifacts to the prioritization workshop.
We mapped the candidate features to customers and their jobs-to-be-done. During the workshop a customer narrative naturally emerged. We started discussing how to optimize for a specific customer job end-to-end throughout our portfolio of 6 products and services, instead of focusing on features that "pleased the crowd" of customers here and there.
The result was the decision to focus on only two (of four) customer profiles, the Professional Translator and the Project Manager. The other two profiles would follow along because of the way they were collaborating in the localization workflows. Then we decided to take a closer look at our ecosystem (see Usability in systems).
