On the importance of talking to your users

When I first joined Yomp (called PleaseCycle at the time) back in August 2013, one of my first tasks was to tackle an inbox with support enquiries from our users. There were probably around 350 unanswered messages that had accumulated over the period of three months or so. I initially thought it would be very dull and all I would end up doing was copying and pasting some template responses. (I even considered outsourcing this task on freelancer.com).

I couldn’t have been more wrong. This exercise gave me a lot of interesting and valuable insights about our users and the software we were developing. I understood a number of things: what the problems were, what wasn’t instantly obvious, which functions didn’t work properly. I understood the issues we had with some of the game mechanics we had introduced and the rules we had created. I also learned about the shortcomings of our UI.

Most importantly, answering these emails enabled me to start conversations. It was enough to add a simple line at the end of each email:

“If you have any suggestions on how we can improve the platform, please don’t hesitate to contact me directly.”

This resulted in us receiving hundreds of feature and UX/UI improvement suggestions. It included both positive as well as negative feedback. This was a great foundation for my role as a product manager.

Kathy Sierra in her talk encourages product managers to understand that it’s not always easy for a user to use the products we develop. I certainly became more empathetic and as Marty Cagan suggests, I started to represent our users at the company’s internal meetings. Someone has to do it. Sales will always represent potential clients, account management will be suggesting ways how to make existing clients’ lives easier and it’s down to product managers to represent the user base. But in order to do that, you need to know what the users’ problems are and there is hardly a better way of finding out than by actually talking with them.

It obviously took me while to clear the support@ inbox. But all the insights I got from that process were extremely important in designing and developing the next version of the Yomp platform and ultimately making our users more satisfied.