How to build customer-centric products without slowing down development

Introduction: The product manager’s dilemma

In today’s fast-paced digital economy, product managers face an ever-present challenge: deliver innovative, high-quality products quickly while ensuring they resonate with customers. 

The pressure to move fast often creates a false choice: skip customer testing to stay on schedule or risk falling behind by prioritizing customer validation. But what if you didn’t have to choose?

Integrating customer input doesn’t have to derail your timeline. In fact, incorporating feedback early and often can accelerate your path to success, reduce costly rework, de-risk decisions, and ensure your product solves real customer problems. You just need a system that helps you gather and analyze customer insights at the pace of customer-centric product development.

Let’s explore why customer validation is essential, what value businesses gain from investing in customer feedback loops, and how to seamlessly integrate their input into your product development lifecycle (PDLC).

The problem: Balancing speed and validation

The perceived trade-off

Many product managers believe customer testing slows the product development process. Tight deadlines, limited resources, and internal pressure to “just ship it” often result in skipping key steps like user research and testing. However, this approach introduces significant risks:

• Missed market fit: Products built on unvalidated assumptions often fail to meet customer expectations.
• Costly rework: Fixing issues post-launch delays success and burns budget.
• Customer churn: A poor user experience leads to lost trust and loyalty.

The reality of skipping validation

Fast-tracking without customer feedback doesn’t save time—it increases the likelihood of errors, delays, and customer disconnect. What’s needed is a way to gather actionable insights quickly without disrupting your timeline.

Why customer validation is essential for business success

Great customer experience (CX) is a living, breathing relationship between an organization and its customers, driven by its continuous focus on the customer across every touchpoint along their journey. 

Organizations that succeed are developing deep customer empathy by constantly talking to their customers to explore and understand their world and their needs. Those efforts lead to customers who feel an emotional connection with their favorite brands, and the ROI from that connection is high—from loyalty and retention to greater share of wallet. 

It's always great to see numbers and hear data points to lead you in a certain direction—it's another thing when you actually see or hear a real customer telling you what they think about something.

Josh Snow SVP Product and Design, NBCUniversal

Customer-centricity drives business results

Products that solve real customer problems deliver measurable outcomes:

• Higher adoption rates: Customers are more likely to embrace products that meet their needs.
• License to charge a premium: Customers are willing to pay a premium for a better experience.
• Retention and revenue growth: Exceptional experiences foster long-term loyalty and products aligned with customer demands drive conversions.

Validation accelerates, not impedes, progress

Early and ongoing feedback prevents costly mistakes and streamlines development by ensuring that every decision is informed by real customer input. This leads to:

• Fewer iterations: Products are closer to market-ready with each cycle.
• Better team alignment: Cross-functional teams rally around validated insights, reducing friction.
• Faster time-to-market: Testing at every stage keeps decision-making on track while minimizing risk.

How to accelerate validation without slowing down development

“Testing early and often” is a mantra that has stood the test of time for a good reason. Getting it right the first time can be a make-or-break moment for your new product, experience, or service. Fast feedback loops ensure you and the team don’t stray off track and that any fixes needed due to feedback are at a manageable scope.

The majority—up to 95%—of new products fail. The reasons are manifold. Perhaps the new product couldn’t oust a longtime customer favorite. Maybe the new product was aesthetically wonderful but was too hard to use, so everyone gave up. 

Or maybe, despite being a superior product, the marketing and go-to-market failed to compel potential customers. We know that it’s simply too challenging to ship successful products that customers adopt and love without checking in with them along the way. 

1. Embed customer feedback into every stage of development

• Concept testing: Validate early ideas and roadmap prioritization with real users before investing resources.
• Prototype feedback: Identify usability issues before development begins.
• Post-launch insights: Gather real-world feedback to inform future iterations.

2. Leverage fast feedback loops

• Adopt agile methods: Prepare your team to collect, analyze, and quickly act on customer insights.
• Set customer validation as an exit criterion: Build testing into your cycles—getting the thumbs up from customers before a milestone like design handoff eliminates costly rework.
• Short feedback cycles: Allow teams to pivot or refine without derailing progress by proactively planning for feedback implementation.

3. Get access to a global network of participants

• Access a network of pre-qualified participants: Work with organizations with pre-vetted participant networks to eliminate the long recruitment lead time.
• Saved audiences: Save groups of participants representing your target segment to re-test or conduct diary studies.

4. Use AI and time-saving tools, templates, and repositories

• Pre-built templates: Use recurring study templates to quickly run concept testing, feature prioritization, usability testing, or validate testing before launch.
• AI automation and workflows: Leverage AI to streamline results analysis, detect trends and patterns, and uncover key findings that convert to action.
• Centralize your research findings: A searchable customer insights hub will go a long way in making informed decisions and eliminating repetitive studies.

5. Foster a culture of customer-centric collaboration

• Align product, UX, and development teams around shared goals, insights, and decision-making criteria.
• Encourage data-driven decision-making over intuition or assumptions.

Embedding customer input into your product development lifecycle

Discovery and problem identification

During the discovery phase, this is a great opportunity to better understand your customers—yet this is often perceived as time-consuming and frequently skipped in product development. 

Talking to customers during early-stage discovery could mean identifying and getting to know different personas or understanding which pain points you need to prioritize. Customer input at this stage can also help make a business case for what you’re proposing to build or determine if buyers are willing to pay to solve the problem. 

Regardless of your goal, as soon as you have a concept in mind, run a few quick tests with customers and potential customers to validate that you’re on the right track. 

Objectives

This phase involves identifying and understanding the problems or challenges that users are facing, which the proposed product will aim to solve. It`s helpful to use customer input to understand which challenges create the biggest pain, their existing approach to solving the problem, and what may persuade them to look for alternative solutions. 

How to do it

• Live customer interviews: Remote, live interviews, known as Live Conversations at UserTesting, are a great place to start during early-stage discovery and validation. Gathering feedback via interview enables your team to have open-ended discussions about a variety of topics, ask customers about their habits, and even have them complete specific tasks (with guidance if they get stuck). Interviews also enable teams to ask follow-up questions and observe non-verbal cues, helping them quickly gather critical insights that will drive more informed decisions.
• Self-guided tests: If you’re short on time for live interviews, you can benefit from remote, self-guided tests. You might not have a product to test at this point in your development, but that’s OK. This is a great time to do some competitive research and discovery to gain a better understanding of how customers currently interact with what’s available—and what they like or dislike about those products or experiences.
• Discovery surveys: Using a combination of live interviews and surveys will give you both qualitative and quantitative context you need to identify and quantify the scope of the problem. Augmenting discovery findings with survey data will also give you data points you may need to accelerate decision making with your data-driven stakeholders.
• Customer journey mapping: By observing customers and prospects—from initial perception to final steps in their decision-making process—you can map their customer journey and identify new opportunities. These insights can help you generate ideas on what to change to improve everything from awareness to conversion.

Tests don’t have to be complicated. They can be as simple as asking your target audience how they currently perform a particular task and how they feel about that experience.  Or, you can ask about their everyday lifestyle and habits, and their thoughts on a particular product or a brand.

In the following video, see the UserTesting Participant Network in action, and how they evaluate mobile experiences—from first impressions to site satisfaction.

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Prototyping

Once you have some early sketches or designs, gather feedback on prototypes early to validate the concept and usability before investing resources to build it out. Does it solve the intended problem? Does the design make sense? Is it clear and intuitive to the user? And if you find out that something in your early designs is really problematic, you can change it and then test again to see if it’s a better experience, before proceeding to development or production. 

Depending on the questions you want answered, you can conduct multiple tests concurrently to accelerate validation. Using time-saving solutions like prototype testing templates, saved audiences, and AI analysis, you can compress a months-long testing cycle into weeks or even days. 

Objectives

Your goal at this stage is to evaluate whether the proposed solution addresses the customer pain point in a way that is better than the current alternative, verify that your product and design direction are on the right track, and identify potential issues that keep your customer from achieving the desired task. 

How to do it

• Concept testing: live customer interviews are a great option if you have a low-fidelity mockup, a non-functional prototype, or a complex design that might require a discussion. Presenting your designs during a live session offers you control over when, where, and with whom your designs are shared and the flexibility to drill down on certain topics in real time.
• Usability testing: this can be done rapidly using self-guided tests once your templates are set up. Self-guided tests may be more useful once you have a higher-fidelity or functional prototype. You can test with an audience of 10 or 100’s and generate results in days or even hours with UserTesting.
• Information architecture: Getting the IA right could differentiate between high and low conversions or high and low adoption rates. Use various methods, including tree tests or card sorting, to evaluate your information architecture.
• Feature prioritization: Need to stack rank how customers value your proposed feature set? Quickly deploy a survey to get quantitative data and have AI analyze the open-ended questions for you or use different task types, such as matrix questions and rating scales, to evaluate customer preferences.
• Mobile testing: Testing on mobile is always a good idea to ensure you’re optimizing experiences across touchpoints. Ask the participants to navigate mobile app prototypes or even ask them to use the camera on their mobile device for at-home or “in the wild” testing. 

If you want to ensure your designs are only shared with the test participant during the test duration, you can share your screen during a remote customer interview or set up a self-guided test. Just be sure that your insight platform offers secure prototype hosting to protect your prototypes.

In the video below, we rounded up examples of participant feedback on prototypes, where our customers could evaluate if they were targeting the right audience or identify technical issues.

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Development and pre-launch

Studies have shown that problems discovered and fixed after a product release have up to 100X the cost compared to when issues are identified and addressed during development. It becomes critical to test as you progress in your customer-centric product development cycle. 

Gathering feedback at each milestone ensures that you can fix these issues before incurring additional resources. Testing can be conducted as you iterate on the design, and through Alpha and Beta testing. 

You might consider using customer validation as a stage gate, ensuring that the product and design direction are on track and getting the customer thumbs up before investing in engineering resources. 

It’s also worth noting that many things are happening in tandem as a product or experience is readied for launch. Marketing and other go-to-market teams are preparing their campaigns and preparing for the launch, so don’t feel limited to reserving consumer insight for product development. These pre-launch customer testing help Product, R&D, and go-to-market teams ensure that your product capabilities and promotional activities are aligned with customer needs and preferences.

How to do it

• Alpha: Even for testing contained to an internal audience, using a testing platform during an Alpha can help you accelerate your cycle. Upload your product for your internal teams to review and have them record their experiences as they speak out loud.
• Beta: Give customers a convenient way of providing feedback in a way that’ll give you better context. Have your customers talk out loud during a self-guided study. You can then conduct a live interview at the end to collate results. For either approach, use AI to auto-generate transcripts, identify key findings, and save key clips to share with your stakeholders.
• Pricing and packaging: Using a mix of methodologies and task types like multiple choice, scale rating, matrix questions, and open-ended feedback, you can evaluate customers’ value perception, willingness to pay, and affinity toward pricing structures.
• Naming and messaging: Get fast feedback on products, naming, campaigns, messaging, and more with the self-guided approach, customer interviews, or surveys. Your team can make sure everything is launch-ready and quickly address any gaps between customer expectations and messaging or product delivery.   

Bringing a customer voice into key decision-making can accelerate your product development cycle and align cross-functional teams. 

In the video below, see how a remote, self-guided exploratory test can uncover any final issues a product or feature might have—before launch.

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If you're feeling inspired, try this needs and frustrations discovery template to identify opportunities to improve products or experiences before launch.

Needs and frustrations discovery template

Post-launch

Customer experience optimization is a continuous process. Once your product has launched, you’ll, of course, be monitoring product adoption, usage, and customer feedback to ensure ongoing success. 

You may also wonder, “Why are people dropping off at this stage in the workflow?” or “Why are there so few returning users?” You can understand why this is happening by collecting qualitative insights to augment your data findings. 

The trick to accelerating customer testing at this stage is to schedule a recurring cadence. For instance, find a group of customers to deploy a survey to every quarter and select a few friendly customers to conduct live interviews with every month to stay connected. 

• Understand adoption and usage behaviors: By practicing talking to your customers regularly, you’ll understand the why behind their behaviors. For instance, the reason they haven’t used the new product, why usage has dropped off, or why only a few users on their account are using the product.
• Benchmarking: Now that your product is live, you can baseline and measure the experience using benchmarking tools like NPS or the QXScore. You can also launch a separate test to drill down into any dips in metrics and create a plan for action.
• Diary studies: You can ask a cohort of customers to record their perceptions, experience, and reactions over time (typically ranging from days to weeks) to identify and analyze patterns.
• Feature prioritization: Continually iterate on your roadmap by integrating customer feedback into your prioritization decisions. Their input can be considered alongside business value, technical feasibility, and other criteria.
• Get to the why behind customer behaviors: from selecting a certain tab or taking steps in a specific order to ungate their workflow or inform you with new and novel use cases. This can all be included in your educational or marketing materials to influence user behavior moving forward. 

Qualitative insights are great when paired with analytics or quantitative metrics you may be tracking. Together, they can better understand the why behind user behaviors. 

Below, watch how digital product teams can gather insights into their customers’ omnichannel experiences post-launch:

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For inspiration, you can keep tabs on customer needs by exploring how they move through various channels with this multichannel journey template.

Multichannel journey template

Build better and faster by listening to your customers

Customer testing and validation, if done right, can help you speed time to market rather than slow you down. 

With UserTesting, you can quickly integrate actionable customer insights into your product development process at every stage of the PDLC, expediting results analysis so that you can make faster, more confident product decisions.