Product Management Playbook — Part 1/6 — Identification

The question we ask in this segment is “Who are our users and what issues are they struggling with?”

In my series “Product Management Playbook — 6 Part Series”, I focus on how product managers can build awesome products that users will actually love and use. In this First Part, we will understand the users and their problems.

Before you start building the product, you need to know who your users are and what their problems or issues are. In this phase, we conduct research to understand what your users do, say, think and feel. The users are the ones who actually use your product — without users, there would be no product! Users are important for all sectors and industries.

The goal of this phase is to intimately know your users, understand them and their needs better than themselves.

Identification essentially occurs in 4 steps:

1. Knowing your users
2. Understanding their problems and needs
3. Targeting the appropriate user segment
4. Validating your findings

Let’s look at each of the steps in detail.

Knowing your users

We need to identify the users to build user-personas which will then be used to identify the problems and needs for each of them.

To build user personas, we need to identify the following attributes of the users:

• Geographic — Country, state, city, urban, rural, …
• Demographic (B2C) — Age, gender, income, education, occupation, device, OS, religion, nationality, language, family size, …
• Demographic (B2B) — Age, industry, size, revenues, products, services, type of customers, …
• Psychographic — Purchase criteria, values, activities, opinions, …
• Behavioral — Benefits sought, usage rate, usage occasion, …

Creating personas will help you better segment your users since it allows you to precisely reach a user with specific needs and problems.

Understanding their problems and needs

Now that we have the user personas, we need to identify the problems and needs of each user persona. This can be done in the following ways:

1. Job Shadowing — Job shadowing is the most preferred way to understand user problems. Job shadowing is where you work alongside the user to gain insight into the user’s work. This will also help you understand the user’s job activities and therefore look for any problems which the users are implicitly and explicitly facing.
2. User Interviews — Another method to understand user problems and needs is user interviews. User interviews are where you ask questions and record responses from the users. This is the simplest approach to know your users better and their needs, but it's always a challenge to talk to them and how to do to get better output from your interviews. Use the “5 whys” technique to separate symptoms from causes.
3. External Knowledge — This is the easiest method to understand the needs of the users. You can go through market and industry reports, competitor analysis, journals, analyst reports, competitive analysis to get a sense of what users might need.
4. Internal Knowledge — There might be some inputs from sales and marketing teams regarding user issues. Also support team will provide insights into the service tickets raised and analyzing this data will point to the issues being faced by your users.

Targeting the appropriate user segment

After you have researched on who your users are and what their needs or problems are, now it’s time to segment them and decide which ones to focus on. You need to choose the segments whose problems or needs you can solve by delivering value to both your users and yourself. Segmenting and targeting user personas helps you know which solution to build. Next step is to validate your findings for the selected user personas. This process is iterative and you keep making changes to user personas, segmentation and targeting as you keep gathering more information.

Validating your findings

Now that you have a sense of what issues your users are facing and what they need from you, you need to double check the same by validating your findings. You need to ask yourself — “Does the problem you are trying to solve really exist for the user. Before you start solving the user problems, it is important that you validate the related assumptions. In real life this means building a hypothesis, collecting real user feedback and checking whether the problem is real for most of the users. You can start by developing a set of questions around the problem and reach out to a number of users to answer the questions.

“The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn’t said.” — Peter Drucker, The Founder of Modern Management

What am I missing here? Let me know in the comments, and don’t forget to share your ideas too!

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