How to talk to one customer every day
The surprising ways in which it gave me the 360° view I always wanted.
Stellar product managers know exactly who their customers are, what they need and how they (want to) use their products. We all know that. No news there. But how do we get there?
I struggled with not really knowing what was going on and who my customers were for a long time, but the feeling intensified when my team at Booking.com started working on a product for accommodation partners.
Turns out, we knew very little about how reservation agents at a Hilton work through their day to day or what someone who is just renting out their spare room as a bed & breakfast needs from us.
As a result, we scheduled user interviews pretty regularly. Product managers at Booking.com are able to query a wealth of analytics data, so I knew the numbers and ratios of different types of users.
An entire user research department exists solely with the purpose of encouraging everyone to “get out of the office”. For example, in so-called “shadowing sessions”, we would follow a hotel employee for half a day to observe their work and environment.
Yet, I just couldn’t get rid of the feeling that I didn’t have a good 360° view of the people we built our product for.
That was, until I found the research tool that works best for me. I still get astonished looks when I talk about this with other product managers since it’s so simple, yet nobody seems to have tried it:
Talk to at least one customer every day.
I started blocking one hour every morning to query one random user that I could give a call. We talked about their last experience with the product, their work, their use of our product, and what they struggle with. I did this every single day without any excuses. I’d skip other meetings, but I wouldn’t skip this.
Sure, we’d still conduct all the structured user research for specific questions, query the data, and no less than before. But that morning ritual was the first time as a product manager that I felt like I was actually receiving the 360° panoramic view I have always wanted.
I talked to over 250 people over the course of a few months, and this really gave me the opportunity to put things in perspective for the team. What were one-off requests? What were the recurring themes? I could bring engaging real-world stories instead of hypotheticals to the team for our sprints.
I [blocked out an hour to talk to customers] every single day without any excuses. I’d skip other meetings, but I wouldn’t skip this.
These qualitative-by-nature phone conversations also happened to have some limited quantitative advantages after a while. We knew about the diversity of our audience from the data — from the big-brand hotels with a thousand rooms down to small, part-time vacation rentals — but talking to these partners allowed me to challenge the assumptions our team had about these groups.
One thing continues to be hard: you have to get yourself to call strangers, deal with rejection, enthusiasm and, sometimes, anger. But it will help you discover the good, the bad, and the ugly in your product.
