Product Discovery Guide: Identify the problem
In this guide, I share my experience leading real product discoveries and explain how to combine various techniques to successfully conduct product discovery.
This article is part of Product Discovery Guide Series:
Topic • Overloaded Customer Care
Overloaded Customer Care
First product discovery I would like to guide you through is “Overloaded customer care with 40k e-mails”. One year ago I was working for logistic company as a CX Product manager. I was responsible for mapping the customer journeys, find the best ways to gather feedback and identify the weak spots on the customer journey which lead to poor customer experience. The job also included leading product development for critical CX touchpoints — claim process and communication tools which required close collaboration with Customer care department.
This discovery can help you to understand the very basics of discovery stages, it can be easily applicable for people who wants to start with the most simple techniques.
Discovery duration: up to 1month
Used techniques:
- Problem statement
- Desk research
- SMART Goals
- Brainstorming
- Value vs. effort matrix
For all of my product discoveries I've been using Miro, I'm huge fan of it, it helps you to visualise your thoughts, empower collaboration and transparency and it's super easy to use for everybody.
I will explain the entire discovery with the help of the Miro boards on which the discovery is documented. You can create your own Miro board and gradually create your product discovery together with me by following the instruction in each Chapter.
And let's start with first step of Product discovery. Take the Miro board named Problem statement and impact.
>>> Open Miro board <<<
1. Problem statement: Identify the problem
The high season for logistic company comes 2–3 months before Christmas, therefore all the activities to prepare for the season must happen during spring to summer. That was the time we identified our problem. Suddenly customer care got overloaded every month by huge amount of emails, specifically 40 000 emails per month which led to prolonging the response time, overload to people and thus decreasing of customer experience.
Identifying the problem is the first step in Product discovery. Ask yourself a question “What problem are we trying to solve” and then identify what are the consequences the problem has impact on — e.g. on product performance, revenue, team, capacities etc. Identifying the problem is important because it serves short, clear explanation of the problem and helps you to keep focus on the problem and its impact.
The output in Miro looks like this:
Where to search for problems / challenges?
EVERYWHERE — data, customer care, sales, user research department. Your daily job as product manager is to talk to people, observe, read the data, ask the right questions, gather feedback and evaluate stuff you should focus on. In my case, head of customer care approached me with this problem because it is crucial to be solved before high season. We sat up together, evaluated current topics and prioritised this one as the most hot topic because of an impact on performance and customer experience.
Exercise for you to try Identify the problem:
Go through your current product and search for inputs:
- Look at the data — are users going through your purchase process smooth? What is your churn rate? Registration ratio? Subscription ratio?
- Talk to sales — what are the biggest challenges for sales to sell your product, what is the customer feedback? Are there any topics which occur all over again?
- Talk to customer care — which topics are the most often ones people are struggling with?
- Talk to UX designers — what are areas they think that deserve attention to increase user experience
- Talk to UX Research team — if you have dedicated user research department in you organisation, talk to them, look at the researches, findings
There must something where you feel your product needs more attention and has opportunity to improve.
Try to fill in this template:
Problem: [What seems to be the issue]
Examples:
- 50% of customers don't finish the purchase
- 20% users unsubscribed from our newsletter in last month
- only 70% customers retention
- decrease in user registration about 30% compare to last year
It causes [What is the impact on your product / business / performance]
Examples:
- Our revenue decreased about 10%
- Customer care overloaded about 50%
- Lack of trust with our users
Congrats! You found your problem, it's time to get to the bottom of it.
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