Welcome to our latest blog series, where we delve into the world of product management. In this series, our team members reflect on our own experiences, successes, and failures with the hopes that our learnings will help you along your Product Management journey.
This Week’s Topic: Understanding Your Users
Discussion Points:
- How do you understand your users and customers?
- When was the last time you listened to them?
- Are you clear about their motivations, feelings, hopes, and dreams?
- In what ways will your product help them?
With thanks to Petra Wille’s “Bucket of Cards” for the prompt.
Key Insights & Takeaways
Challenges of Engaging Directly with Customers
As product managers, we all know that we’re supposed to talk to customers, but sometimes that’s easier said than done. If you find yourself facing challenges with this, here are a few known anti-patterns, indirect workarounds, and learnings that you can use
Anti-Patterns
- The main stakeholder has the answers and doesn’t want to waste time, resources, and money talking to end users
- Priorities and projects are prescribed by leadership without input or feedback from product, design, engineering, or the end-user
- Another team or business unit owns the customer relationship (sales, business analysis, customer success, user research, etc.)
What To Do
- Find ways to directly or indirectly engage with your end customer
- Utilize tools like usertesting.com or userinterview.com
- Administer a combination of synchronous and asynchronous usability tests or interviews
- Review app store ratings, reviews, customer support tickets, and public customer forums
- Utilize analytics and product insights to segment users into different cohorts and monitor feedback, behavioral changes, and discrepancies across groups
Learnings
- Asynchronous interviews and usability tests can be valuable tools to capture insights, automate parts of the discovery process, and scale the team out
- Nothing beats face-to-face or synchronous communication because of the ability to ask follow-up questions, pivot mid-conversation, and learn where users are becoming frustrated or confused
- Talking to users who share similar characteristics or attributes is valuable when you can’t contact your end user directly
Save Time, Money, & Heartache
Have you spent a sizable amount of time, energy, and resources pushing a product or feature that wasn’t adopted? Unfortunately, this is an experience that Product Managers have all experienced at one time or another.
Anti-Patterns
- Deciding to build something without verifying the need for it
- Focusing exclusively on delivery, neglecting discovery
- Waiting for a feature to be complete before soliciting feedback from customers
What To Do
- Find the quickest way to validate your customer needs. This could be adding a fake button to count clicks or building lower fidelity wireframes that can help you “future-proof” an idea without investing time, money, and resources into it
- Build a culture that rewards discovery, experimentation, and failure versus one that pushes folks to be “right” all the time
- Make continuous discovery part of your product management, team, and organizational proactive
Learnings
- It’s cheaper and less painful to be wrong up front vs. learning that you were wrong later after a year of development and nobody uses your feature
- Great way to get in front of stakeholders, investors, and customers without investing time or making a significant commitment
- A good way to test and gather feedback around a product pivot or a new market launch
Understanding Customer Intentions
You’re interviewing customers and hearing about the new features and solutions that will solve their problems. Are you asking the right questions? How do you avoid confirmation bias? If you haven’t read The Mom Test or Continuous Discovery Habits, you absolutely should.
Anti-Patterns
- Believing everything your users tell you
- Focusing too much on the solutions that they’re sharing instead of understanding the root cause, motivation, or problem
- Asking questions that confirm or validate our current assumptions and understandings
What To Do
- Focus on learning and understanding emotional drivers
- Ask open-ended questions, try “what” and “how”
- Avoid discussing hypothetical or theoretical situations
- Gather feedback and examples based on real-life, past examples
- “Tell me about the last time you…”
- Avoid talking about your product
Learnings
- People like to tell us things that they think we want to hear
- Customers are notoriously bad at “solutionizing”
- Journey mapping is a valuable exercise to get into the heads of our customers and understand what’s driving their fears, hopes, and desires
Casting The Net Too Wide
Should you be talking to every single customer or persona? Or should you focus on one niche? Read through the customer-focus section of our continuous discovery playbook for helpful insights.
Anti-Patterns
- Trying to survey and interview all participants and personas at once
- Overgeneralizing or oversimplifying personas
What To Do
- Be clear about who your target audience is when screening participants
- Focus on a core user group or segment
- Keep personas up-to-date and create interview snapshots that summarize key insights
- Continuously ask yourself if this is the right person you should be talking to
Learnings
- Targeted feedback from a core user demographic is more valuable than generalized feedback from a wide range of end-users
- It’s okay to pivot and change “core user demographics” if your feedback invalidates your initial assumption or hypothesis
- Sometimes user testing will unearth a new core user demographic that you weren’t aware of
