Do you know why your customers use your product?

How confident are you that your customers (or your users / community members in an open source context) are using your software in the way you intended, to solve the problems you intended to solve?

You’d be surprised how often I talk to CEOs and founders who say things like “we surveyed our customers and found that the majority were using the software in a way we didn’t envision” or “we surveyed our customers and realized that the users are in a different job title than we expected.”

If your entire website talks about solving X and it turns out that your customers actually care about Y, how effective will your website be?

If you develop a sales campaign targeted at directors of development, but it turns out that most of your customers are CISOs, how effective will your sales campaign be?

If you fundamentally misunderstand who gets the most value out of your software, how do you know what features would add value and which ones would distract or even reduce value? How do you develop a product roadmap?

Positioning your product and your company is a critical part of determining your marketing strategy, your sales strategy and your product roadmap. And understanding why your customers like your product (or at least why they use it) is the foundation. If you’re not sure how to do it, reach out.