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Most product development processes don't consider ROI, but it's probably the best way to improve the effectiveness of this process for your product company.Let's talk about how to find your customer's bottleneck and what that means for providing them and your company with more value.If you want to reach product-market fit faster, sign up for my free 5 day email course here - https://nxtstep.io/fit/Episode TranscriptHey, folks, Sean here.And today what I want to talk to youabout is my favorite way to get more ofan ROI out of your product development process.And it starts with finding whatI refer to as the bottleneck.So if you're unfamiliar with this as a concept, youcan think of a bottleneck almost if you're like, goingover a bridge and you have to go through atoll, usually it goes from many lanes down to afew lanes as you go over said bridge.Now, that is kind of visually how you canthink of of what is a bottleneck, right?It goes from high traffic area to a low trafficarea or vice versa, as in slowing the process downconsiderably because you are funneling what was moving much morequickly or in higher volume into what's ultimately going tomove a lot more slowly or much lower volume.Now, that is a good visual kindof understanding of what a bottleneck is.But to understand what it means from a processperspective, the same thing happens when your customer maybe trying to do something much more quickly, butsomething in that process, any given step, like goingthrough a toll of a bridge, for example, isslowing that process down.They may want to get from Ato B much faster, but they can'tbecause something's preventing them from doing that.And that thing that's preventing themfrom doing that is the bottleneck.So if you're trying to level up your productdevelopment process, a great way to be able todo that would be to, through research with yourcustomer, better understand and find these bottlenecks in theirprocess that are slowing them down.Now, in order to be able to do that,as I mentioned, you need to do the research.So you need to speak with them and youneed to talk to them about not what theywant necessarily in the future, but what's preventing themfrom getting what they want right now.Focus on historically what they've tried todo, what's worked and what hasn't worked.That'll give you a much better idea for wherethey need the most help and what may bethe biggest bottleneck in their process to date.So if you start with that approach, it's going toenable you to find areas of opportunity to turn.What I refer to is problemsworth solving into solutions worth building.So let's talk more detail about what happenswhen you help them make this transformation.Now, to me, by far the most exciting part aboutfollowing a process like this is it enables you tocalculate the return on investment built into the process.And that's something that doesn't happen a whole lot.In terms of the clients that I work with tryingto help them level up their product development processes, whatgets built is often not based on ROI or customervalue or even value for the business, which sounds weird,but it happens a whole lot.So what I love about this process is it'sstraightforward in going from the customer's problem, looking forthe best area of opportunity to try to improvetheir situation and quantify it along the way.That's going to be important aswe figure out how much value.Ultimately, building that solution to eliminate saidbottleneck is going to provide for them.Because if that number is high enough, that's going toenable your product or your company or both to beable to generate more value as well too.In terms of if your customer is getting ahigh enough return on investment, in terms of thatnew solution that you're providing for them in theform of your product by eliminating this bottleneck, thatmay give you the ability to generate more revenuethrough your product, which is going to increase thevalue of the product and the company as well.So that's the most exciting aspect ofthis and that's essentially how it happens.So if you go from understanding what the bottleneckis, which again, just to summarize, is figuring outthe type of progress your customer is trying tomake, understanding what is specifically slowing them down andtrying to make that progress, as in they wantto move faster, but they can't. Why can't they?You need to figure out what that isand that's where you're going to laser focus.But you also at the same time need to understand whatthe impact of them not being able to move faster is.This is where you start to getinto the ability to quantify it.So if they tell you, well, we could move tentimes faster if we eliminated this step or solved somethingrelated to this step, that's great, but what outcome isthat going to enable them to achieve?If you can ultimately figure out what that outcomeis going to enable them to be able toachieve, like, are they going to reduce how muchtime gets invested into this process across an entireteam or the organization by 90%?If so, that leads to a huge number.As you start to quantify how much we're talking about interms of what you would need to pay that team inorder to do and how much time they're going to getback, or maybe it enables them to charge more, right?Whatever it is you want to drive towardsthe successful outcome, eliminating that bottleneck is goingto enable them to be able to achieve.So if you've found one, that'sgreat, but don't stop there.You have to keep going until you get greater contextfor understanding what eliminating that bottleneck is going to meanfor them, as in what transformation are you going tohelp them be able to make once you know thatyou have a better understanding for the value that theywill get if you prioritize building this solution.So, like I said before, if you move fromwhat we've uncovered in eliminating this bottleneck is aproblem worth solving into a solution worth building.You want to understand what type of outcomethat's going to enable them to achieve andwhat type of return on investment they're goingto get as part of this process.And if you understand that, you understand how to quantifythe value the customer is going to receive if youprovide them with that solution through your product.And if you do that as well too, and thatnumber is high enough, that may give you an opportunityto generate more revenue through your product because of howmuch value you're providing them, which makes your product morevalue and your company more valuable.So this is one strategy that I use on aregular basis which can provide pretty immediate results in termsof how to level up your product development process andbuild return on investment into the process itself.
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