Week 7 - how do you learn from users to build great products
Quote
“Pay attention to what users do, not what they say.”
💯 Framework // Concept // Mental Model
How do you learn from users to build great products
Customer obsession doesn't mean asking the customer what they want and building it for them but it's understanding the customer at a deeper level and gathering insight on what the customer might be interested in.
Everyone believes talking to the customers is right and they do it but still, people end up building stuff that is not used by customers. The process of uncovering what customer wants is more than just talking to the customers, if you don’t do it right which people don’t often you end up building stuff not used by anyone.
Here are 5 things that you can do to uncover the right insights
Talk to the right customers
Take your time when you define the customer. Defining the right customer segment helps solve problems for the right set of people. Think about the ideal customers that you want to speak to. ask your self questions like
Is the customer you are talking to representing your future user base?
Is this segment too broad
Can I further segment the user
When you have a fuzzy sense of who your customer is you tend to talk to multiple customer segments at a time which leads to confusion.
With a broad customer segment are three problems you end up with
overwhelmed by option
you are moving forward and you next get a chance to disprove something as you talk to new segment every-time
Mixed feedback
If you aren’t finding consistent problems and goals, you don’t yet have a specific enough customer segment. The drilling down into ever more specific groups is called Customer Slicing. You take a segment and then keep slicing off better and better sub-sets until you’ve got a tangible sense of who you can go talk to and where you can find them.
Ask good questions and avoid bad questions
every question you ask can bias the customer and can make the exercise useless.
Asking good questions and drawing valuable insight will help you to avoid bias or misleading information from the customers.
How do you know if you are asking a bad question or not?
Let's look into an example to differentiate between good and bad questions, assume you are building a day planner app for Alexa and you would want to validate the idea with your customers and see if this feature would be valuable to them.
Bad question:
Do you think building a day planner app on Alexa is a good idea?
Would you use a day planner app on Alexa?
Would buy a product that would plan your day?
Good Question:
How do you plan your regular day?
What apps do you use to plan your day?
Why are you planning your day that way?
What are you trying to achieve?
Are you actively looking for a replacement for the app you use?
If you not looking for a replacement why not?
How much time do you spend planning your day?
Bad questions just give you opinions of your customer but good question gives you info on how they feel and what frustrates them the most, which would give valuable insight into why people might need your feature or product. Take all the information in your good questions and decide if your product is right or not.
Keep them Casual
Learning about a customer and their problems works better as a casual chat than a long, formal meeting. Treat meeting as a conversation rather than something formal making it uneasy for the customers.
Understand why and dig deep
It's important to understand why people are saying something, and What is the root cause of the problem. Getting into the details will help you dig deep into the problem and solve the right problem rather than solving a problem at the surface level which acts as a band-aid to customer problems.
Understand what are they saying to you and what are you taking away from it. Listen to all what customers say, look at the facial expressions they make, and gather every piece of data you can gather from the customer interview and see why is this a problem for them have they not put enough to understand the product, Why does it matter to them, is this solving a big enough problem for them. look for commonalities in your customer feedback. You should prioritize the most popular problems first since these are affecting the most customers at your business. Correcting these issues should make a significant impact on customer satisfaction and improve the overall customer experience.
Some questions you can ask your self digging deeper
Why does this product matter to the customer?
Does this product solve a problem the customer cares about?
Is the customer willing to pay for this product?
Talk less listen more
Talking less and opening your ears tells you more about whether a concept will work or not. The best discoveries are made by letting information come to you
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Thanks for sharing!
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