The Nuts and Bolts of Customer-Led Product Growth with Jamin Brazil, Chairman of HubUX

Product Leaders Podcast

A big shoutout and hi to all product leaders. Welcome to the inaugural episode of the Product Leaders Podcast by Fireart with your host Dima Venglinski and Tolik Nguyen. Every episode is a deep dive into different aspects of product leadership to enhance the end-user experience.

In this episode, Dima is joined by Jamin Brazil, Chairman of HubUX, a platform for qualitative and UX Research. Jamin describes himself as a career market researcher and career entrepreneur. He shares his insights on using customer inputs to develop a product they will love to use and how product pricing strategies impact the revenue stream.

Topics we Discuss:

• The difference between product development and customer-led development
• Resource allocation prioritization pre and post-launch
• How to leverage user insights to refine your product and deliver enhanced UX
• Freemium pricing, yes or no

Hot Takes and Key Highlights:

Market-Led Approach Gives a Base Product, Refine it with Customer Insights

Market-led product development gives you a base product; you’re now offering the basics offered by your competition. You need to refine this with customer insights to gain a competitive edge and delight your customers. Pre-launch, ensure you have invested in the discovery process, where you talk to a relevant audience and understand their real problems. Post-launch, you continue tweaking your product based on customer feedback. Product development is a bolt-on approach.

“What I do is create a platform by which I can service the core customer need, and then I listen to customers, watch what they do, and talk to them every day”. - Jamin Brazil.

Invest Wisely at Every Product Development Stage

In the pre-market stage, you need to focus your spending on the discovery process, including customer interviews and continual prototyping. You’re investing in identifying the real issues of the audience and testing if your prototype addresses those issues. Post-launch, the investment focus shifts to creating awareness of your product through marketing while constantly seeking out customer feedback on what they like and dislike and the additional features they require.

“I’ve personally lost a tremendous amount of wealth by building products that I thought were right for the market without validating customer need”. - Jamin Brazil.

How to Acquire and Leverage Customer Insights

Focus on collecting qualitative feedback from your customers. Quantitative data like NPS scores don’t answer why the customer rated you a five instead of an eight on the one to ten scale. Identifying and refining based on the why is the difference between retaining a happy customer or losing them to the competition.

How you frame the questions defines the feedback you will get, and for qualitative questions, show the stimuli or solution before asking the question. The reason here is simple. Most times, our purchase decisions are based on emotions, and that is the side the questions should address. Customer feedback should be garnered using qualitative surveys that provide a business with feedback on user experience and potential growth opportunities.

“Companies spend over 80 billion dollars annually on quantitative survey data and eight billion on qualitative data. Over the next five years, there will be a role reversal where qualitative research will replace quantitative data”. - Jamin Brazil.

Jamin’s Insights on Freemium Pricing and its Impact on the Revenue Stream

Jamin firmly believes in the credo, “if you’re providing a service to the customer, that service should be monetized.” He believes that freemium pricing is essential for getting a customer to try your product, which applies at both a startup and enterprise level. However, freemium pricing should have a time limit; otherwise, it negatively impacts a company’s revenue stream.

In the B2B space, you’re competing for customer dollars already being spent on your competitor's product. To win over those dollars, you need a product that outperforms the competition, and you need to look at issues like pricing and trade terms.

“I do not believe in free business service. I think if I’m providing a service, then it needs to have an associated cost”. - Jamin Brazil.

Guest at a Glance:

Jamin Brazil is passionate about building products that address endemic problems in business and is a strong proponent of customer-led product development instead of a market-led model. He has over 20 years of experience using market research to collect customer insights and then apply them to build great products.

Jamin Brazil on LinkedIn

HubUX on LinkedIn

HubUX Website

Hosts at a Glance:

Dima Venglinski: Dima is the CEO of Fireart Studio, a boutique design and software development company with a commitment to innovation and technology. His client portfolio ranges from startups to established global brands like Rolls Royce, Google, and Atlassian.

Connect with Dima on LinkedIn

Fireart Studio Website

Tolik Nguyen: Tolik is the CSO and Partner at Fireart Studio and leads the strategy team while solving company’s and user’s issues from an early idea stage.

Connect with Tolik on LinkedIn

Fireart Studio Website

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