Users User Users — learning from you (yes you) and from NYC’s product leaders

As product people, we love our users. Nothing gives us more joy than solving their problems, seeing them delighted, and if we’re lucky, changing their quality and length of lives.

But — how do we actually get to know your users? Please fill out this survey [now closed] about your qualitative user research practices. Responses are anonymous, though add your email address and we’ll send you the synthesized results. I’m curious to learn about how we spend time with users differently across geographies, company size, and user types.

I’m also excited to hear from some of New York’s finest product leaders at this year’s New York Product Conference, where the theme is … Users. Some of the topics:

• NY Times’s Product head Alex Rainert will be talking about serving all users in our complex news environment.
• Jet.com Product leader Sarah Bernard will be sharing some of how Jet figured out user needs in building one of NYC’s biggest tech exits — in a short few years.
• Foursquare and Expa founder Naveen Selvadurai will be sharing how he sees and creates the future users don’t see yet.
• Leaders from Invision, Trello, and UserTesting will give insight into building products for product builders. (How meta!)
• Leaders from Work & Co, Fahrenheit 212, Alpha, and Method will share how they learn about new users and industries. Quickly.
• Leaders from Vroom, Kickstarter, Justworks, and Blue Apron will share how they serve users while scaling.
• Leaders from Ringly, Glossier, and Updater will discuss how to build successful non-software products as tech companies.

I’ll be excited to see many of you there at the event. I’ll also share a synthesis of the discussions above after the day. The better we all know and understand our users, the better we can serve them and build products that count.