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FIGURE 2.1 A flat curb in front of a New York City crossing.

      Play-Doh, the modeling clay used by young children for arts and crafts projects (see Figure 2.2) was not originally intended for children when it was first introduced to the market in the 1930s. Kutol Products, a soap manufacturer in Cincinnati, Ohio, targeted it at people who wanted to remove coal residue from wallpaper. Only after a classroom of children in Cincinnati started using it as a modeling compound (20 years later) did the manufacturer realize its true audience was completely different. Long story short, in 2003 Play-Doh was included in the Toy Industry Association’s list of toys of the century.

      FIGURE 2.2 Play-Doh.

      One of the hardest things to know in product development is who your target audience is. Product developers might come up with a very specific target audience only to find out that a completely different audience is finding value in their product, which is a good thing. Or, even more surprising, they might discover that their actual audience is very different than the intended one.

Why Is This Question Important?

      Getting to know your audience, who they are, what makes them tick, what brings them happiness, frustration, and motivation helps you build a better product, feature, or service. It makes you find better product roadmap decisions when no other data is available. It also prevents your team from going into exhausting debates about different aspects of assumed customer behavior or what analytics data mean. The alternative is that you get a Frankenstein product that is just a conglomerate of features that has everything for no one.

      There are two types of information about people that you’ll need: demographics and behaviors. Marketing practitioners generally use demographics to target product messaging through customer segmentation. Since this book is about product development, it focuses on behaviors, largely because they often cut across traditional demographic segmentations. Table 2.1 provides an example that demonstrates this difference. By the end of this chapter, you will have an archetypical profile of several users or customers (or potential users or customers) differentiated by their behaviors.

TABLE 2.1 HUMAN BEHAVIOR VS. DEMOGRAPHIC LABELS

When Should You Ask the Question?

      Getting an answer to the question “Who are the users?” just as strategizing begins is the most helpful timing. That said, it almost never happens. Because it is not always clear when a new idea for a product, feature, or service is born, it’s also not clear when strategizing around it actually begins. Therefore, any time in the early stages of strategizing is great for asking (and answering) the question (see Figure 2.3).

      Assuming the question was answered in the early stages of strategizing, there is no reason to answer it again during the execution stage. After your product has been launched, there might be new, additional audiences using it. If you want to learn who these new audiences are, answering the question anytime after launch is going to be helpful. It will also support future developments and changes to the product.