Twenty years ago, I was part of a team at a large financial services company building one of the first online wealth-management tools. While it was transformational at the time and really a huge improvement for our customers, like many new products, we didn’t quite get it right the first time.

Our desire to test and viscerally understand customers was there. But, at the time, the tools to do this were limited. We invited users to come to our testing lab (yes, physically come in) and try out the tool, which was a great idea except for one problem: The product was already built. We were asking customers for feedback after the fact and thus were disincentivized to incorporate their input lest it slow the product’s release. After all, we had committed to deadlines with our company leadership, and they had to be met. In cases where we wanted to incorporate feedback, we still had to rebuild the product—slowing the time to get to the right product market fit.

In the end, customers ended up not loving that first release. If only we had listened to users sooner in the process, we could have caught their concerns earlier, improved the tool’s features, and gotten a better product to market.

While it might be easy to dismiss that experience as ancient history, the fact is that for a long time—even now, well into the digital age—many organizations have failed to properly integrate user research and feedback into the design loop so that products meet business requirements and are truly are based on customers’ needs and wants. Launching research studies could take months before seeing results. Leaders had to make the trade off between time to market and integrating insights before building and launching.

Some companies are still challenged in gathering customer insight earlier in the process and working in partnership with their product counterparts during ideation and early stages. I’ve learned the hard way that there needs to be time and effort for meaningful iterations and significant improvements. Moreover, we know that the cost of correcting misaligned experiences rises over time and escalates exponentially once the product is built.

Others may simply have been stuck in an old way of thinking—that it’s okay for companies to release products that they have conviction in, without having made the effort to really understand the experience from the customer’s perspective.

In most cases, it’s not that organizations need to be convinced of the value of customer insights, but rather, that they lack the time, resources, or the processes to integrate research into their product development cycles without compromising deadlines and revenue objectives.

Lastly, technology was still evolving to make the process of gathering customer feedback easier, faster, and more cost efficient.

GAINING INSIGHT EARLY AND OFTEN

But now, an important trend is taking hold as more businesses realize that gaining deep insights from users early and often is no longer optional but a requirement in meeting customer expectations, driving adoption, and building brand loyalty. The earlier the product teams incorporate continuous customer learnings at the speed of agile product development cycles, the greater its business value. This minimizes the high cost of rework or the risk of shipping a product that will fail to meet customer expectations and result in sunken costs.

Related: The return of the whiteboard—and four other trends

We refer to the idea of testing early and often and giving customers a voice earlier in the process as the “shift left mindset.” The idea also implies the importance of engaging UX teams earlier in product-development cycles. Shift left isn’t a play the Chiefs or 49ers might have run in the Super Bowl but rather a strategic initiative to incorporate users’ observations as soon as possible—even when the product is just a concept on a drawing board—and maintain that customer focus while mitigating risks associated with each stage of product development.

The term, shift left, originated in the software-development field, where it refers to the practice of concentrating on testing and quality control from the first stages of a software build (the left-hand side being the early stages) rather than waiting until just before release into production when the cost of fixes are exponentially higher. But it turns out that whether you’re a software developer or a product developer, the same is true: Testing assumptions from the get-go, continually identifying areas for improvement, and ensuring that the end result meets customer expectations is the only way to be successful.

It’s a best practice that more and more customer-experience-minded companies are embracing. A major retailer, for example, has learned that its search page is vital to sales—customers rely heavily on the search function to find what they’re looking for, rather than navigating through the site. Learning about the customer experience after changes to the search page go live poses too high a risk on its online revenue. Therefore, the company is meticulous about understanding user behavior before deploying any updates.

THE SHIFT-LEFT REVOLUTION

Within increasing numbers of organizations, the shift left concept is paving the way for more mature models to emerge for the user experience design industry, raising the role of UX as the voice of the customer and driving strategy.

More are hiring specialized experts in human factors, research, and other fields and involving them earlier and throughout product development—including for products that are just ideas and have yet to even hit the product roadmap.

Instead of just testing features or experiments, more companies are moving customer feedback even further to the beginning of the process. They are leveraging research and insights before the PDLC starts, aiming to uncover opportunities for innovation and unlocking new markets and growth.

And more are devising specific quality experience scores, benchmarks in terms of customer usability and satisfaction, for every product feature or customer journey they design and applying them at every stage of development.

AI’S INCREASING ROLE IN PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

Two main factors have combined to shift research and customer insights to the left.

First, today’s digitally empowered, social media-savvy consumers have unprecedented choices and high expectations for outstanding experiences, and brands know they must deliver them. Earlier touchpoints with customers are critical in keeping up with their fast-evolving expectations. At the same time, tightening company budgets have put even more pressure on product teams to get things right. “Measure twice, cut once”—making doubly sure customer needs are understood and addressed at the outset—has become imperative.

Second, advancing technology has rendered moot the concern that getting customer insights to assure well-researched and extensively tested products and services is too time-consuming. As we moved away more than a decade ago from the waterfall approach to adopt technology that supports agile development cycles, companies have a prime opportunity to really bring experience research forward into agile development cycles.

Newer technology has made it faster and easier than ever to get customer input across every stage of product development: discovery and idea generation, competitor research, planning, prototyping, testing and validation, and launch. No longer can gathering insights legitimately be seen as a slowdown; just the opposite, it’s an accelerator for releasing products that stick.

And now AI is dramatically unlocking even more efficiencies.

Previously, gathering customer feedback was a tedious, manual process. Now, AI significantly streamlines this by automatically analyzing video, text, and behavior to identify important themes and insights. This efficiency not only saves time for product teams, but also enables the analysis of larger, more representative samples of customer sentiment. Additionally, AI can assist in creating test plans and suggesting questions to further enhance product development.

The future of shift left is organizations using AI and other technologies to build a true customer insights knowledge base that is reusable and shared across the organization. UX teams are the ones that are in the position to drive this movement, enabling its product and engineering counterparts to embed customer insights earlier in the process. As such, we see them playing an increasingly more strategic role across organizations.

Shift left is—pardon the pun—the right paradigm at the right time. By adopting it, organizations can sharpen their focus on a user-centric approach that prioritizes the right features, reduces risks, and continually improves the product throughout its lifecycle.

Shift left has become a product development best practice because it forges the best route to securing product success and brand loyalty: truly getting into the customer’s shoes! Shifting left is an important best practice in product development—not just to make sure everything is up to snuff functionally but to truly bring the voice of the customer and their feedback and perspectives into this best practice.