Christian is founder of www.productable.de, a company specialized in product strategy, early stage product research, concepts and interim product management.

Oct 10, 2016

(Re)Claim Your Research

Research is a vital part of any product development process. A lot of questions need to be answered on the way from idea to launch.

While research in later stages of the development process is well established and there is little doubt that this is a crucial task which every product manager needs to master, early stage research is a totally different thing.

The main job of early stage research is to validate problem/solution-fit:
Is there a customer problem worth solving and does our solution solve the problem?

Answers to these questions largely define the key characteristics, costs and overall outcome of a product. If a product manager should care about one thing, then it is getting deeply involved in this kind of research. Strange enough, I see hardly anyone doing it.

Instead, a typical early stage research project looks like this:

“We need research!”
Kick-off
“What should we do?”
“A survey would be great!”
“We don’t have enough time! Why don’t we get the agency we had last time?”
“Woah, but that’s expensive!”
“We must leverage this across all departments to get the most out of it!”
More and more people get involved.
“Would be nice to learn this … and this … and this … and that!”
“We really need to finalize the input for the agency, please review!”
More items are added.
Agency does all the work. (Blackbox)
1h presentation of 250 slides + 30min Q&A.
“Wow, that is really interesting!”

Best thing about such a research project is that it leaves everyone with the good feeling of finally having been out of the building. However, the gap between perception and reality could not be any bigger. Consequently, a product produced based on these kind of insights looks like this:

Photo by Bill Stillwell on flickr under CC License

The intention is somewhat visible and you might even find some customers who are willing to buy, but as the overall benefit is limited there is no potential for a true market fit and scalable business model. Even worse: There is little chance that any later stage research like lab- or multivariate-testing will bring your product back on track. The wrong path has been taken right at the start based on pseudo-customer insights. You either end up optimizing a per se sub-optimal product with lots of effort or scrapping it.

There are two standard answers I receive when I ask product organizations why they again and again (often even knowingly) waste tons of money for research projects generating insights they neither need nor understand:

“I don’t have time to do this.”
“I don’t know how to do this.”

The good news is that both assumptions are not true in most cases. Early research is no rocket science at all and everyone can quickly advance to a decent level that is totally sufficient for almost all settings. The question to ask is if you want to have 95% accurate data that is hardly usable or 80% accurate data that can be directly converted into action:

This leaves the statement of having not enough time and that implies the bad news: Time is a matter of priority. If there is no time for early stage research the product managers and/or the organization simply do not care. With this attitude product management becomes easy prey to all sorts of biz devs, researchers and agencies who make a good living by producing presentations that pile up and rot away in drawers.

If you are ok with a wooden spoiler, you can stop reading here. For all others: It is time to (re)claim your research! Let Biz Dev and Market Research do whatever they want, you need to define and own your early stage research based on your specific product management questions and needs!

Starting point for your research is the question about context and intent of your planned research. This sounds trivial but it is actually a hard thing to do. Force yourself to write it down. Making things explicit will help you to drill to the very core of the questions you need to answer.

If you are clear about the why of your research it is time to list what you know and what you don’t know. It is tempting to just give the whole wish-list of things into the research. But before you do this, rethink. There is always a lot of stuff you do not know but which is also not really relevant (at least right now). And it is also ok to have assumptions, i.e. things you do not actually know but which you take as given. Cutting away all assumptions and all things that are not relevant (for now), leaves the pieces that you need to tackle: All the things that you need to know NOW (getting into the unknown unknowns, probably the most exciting part of any research, cannot really be planned for and comes as a by-product anyway). If in doubt, slice your research asks just as you slice epics.

Only when you know what you need to know now and why, it’s time to think about the research method. As always, there is no silver bullet here. There are plenty of options and you will want to find the leanest possible approach, balancing validity and effort. As a start, take a look at Tomer Sharon’s book “Validating Product Ideas”, then reclaim your research and get going!