I speak a lot with entrepreneurs discussing if they are building a “must-have” or “nice-to-have” product. This usually involves something that is mission-critical and/or in the workflow for the customer. How do you make that happen?

Understand the workflow

First, you have to really understand the customer problem and workflow. Really spend time in customer discovery learning why they have the problem, when it happens, what they do to try and solve it, and why the current method is not good enough. I am also a big fan of not just hearing the customer describe the situation, but also watching them in action. There are many learnings from seeing the customer do the work live. You could see a step they forgot to tell you, how they struggle to connect two different data sources, the multiple people involved, cues from the environment, etc. As a bonus, make all functions of your team (sales/product/engineering/etc) regularly visit customers and observe them in action.

Embed for action vs. information

I see many products that deliver great reports or information. While that is helpful, those usually are just “nice-to-have” because they still put all the work on the customer to then take action from the report to get any results. Do they have to then go further to vet the information, pull the information into a different system, or then convince other employees to do something with the information? When that same information is embedded in the workflow, it can make the decision real-time and immediately create action.

Enjoy stickiness

Products in the workflow tend to be much stickier and lead to lower churn. Product A could be a fraud product that produces a report of potential fraud and makes an investigator try and recover the dollars after they were paid. Product B could be a fraud product in the workflow that flags the potential fraud and stops payment before it happens. Which one do you think will be more effective and stickier at renewal time? Once that product is in the workflow, it becomes very difficult to remove without messing up their process (and we know people don’t like change).

As you are building your product, really understand the customer workflow and try hard to make your product fit into that workflow so the customer gets more value and you create a stickier product.