5 Tips on How to Launch Successful Products With User Research
We live in a world where choices are plenty. Customers today are faced with several tens to even hundreds of options when it comes to making daily decisions such as hailing a taxi, watching a TV show, shopping online or making a phone call! This may seem discouraging for anyone looking to launch a new product in a space that seems to have so much obvious competition. Yet, we see the likes of Uber, Netflix, Whatsapp, and Amazon finding ways to break through the competition and soar to the top. How are they doing that?
For a product to be successful, at bare minimum, the product needs to offer something unique and compelling to the target customer segment. To put that in context, even for something as mundane as booking a taxi, Uber found ways make that experience unique and compelling. As a product manager, you are entrusted with the responsibility of coming up with that “unique value proposition” to truly set your product apart. Where would you begin?
Typically you would begin by observing the market for opportunity, do a SWOT analysis with your competition and try to identify gaps in their product offerings for you to make an entry. While this is absolutely the right approach to break down your competition, it is not the ideal place to start.
The best place to begin is from the source — the customer. While our customers today do have several choices of products to choose from, in reality very few of them come close enough to suit a specific customer’s needs and wants. In order to figure out what you need to build, you should first begin by asking key questions:
- Who is your customer?
- What do they do?
- What is their lifestyle like?
- What are their priorities?
- When do they consider using your product?
- How do they feel about the choices they have?
In essence, only after you are truly immersed in your customers lives, you can feel their pain when choosing among the available options and thoroughly empathize with the problems they are facing. Only then you are in a position to make a sound decision on what to build!
Now you’re thinking, who has that kind of time? How many customers do I need to shadow and for how long? Will my customers even let me into their lives? What if they find it too intrusive? You’re right! We do not have weeks or months to learn about our customers, although the more time we spend with them, the more we learn about them.
Before we jump into specific techniques, there are two broad ways to dissect your customer segments — Quantitative and Qualitative Research.
Quantitative Research
This includes sending out surveys to your current and potential customers to start gathering data. Broadly, these surveys help you identify themes and patterns about your customers. You can now identify customer segments that are resonating with your product, those that aren’t, high level concerns, how you stand against your competition etc. Analyzing the survey results will give you a starting point to develop some hypothesis on what is working and what isn’t working for your product.
Qualitative Research
Once you have identified segments of users that like and dislike our product, you can now set up exercises with select user groups and get deeper into their lives. The purpose of this exercise is to get an in-depth understanding of how these users live their lives, what role your product plays/would play in their lives, how they plan to use it and what problems would they hope to alleviate by using the product.
User Research is an iterative process.
Once you have a better understanding of the target customer and their biggest problems, you can evolve mock ups and wireframes of the product you wish to build. Arrange to go back to the user group and run the wireframes by them to get a sense of how they would interact with the product. By studying their activities, measuring time spent to accomplish a certain task and their reactions to the various features in the mockup, you can then go back and refine the product to be built before you begin development.
How to Get Started?
Let’s answer some questions that are top of mind when you begin your user research.
1. Where to find your target audience? Who do you ask?
This can often be the most daunting part of the Discovery journey : “where do I begin?” The best place to begin is with your existing customers. Start by asking where your customers are discovering your products or competitor products, where did they buy it, and what that experience was like. You can then take this framework to approach adjacent segments to compare responses and learn more about who could fit into your target addressable market. Additionally, attending trade shows and conferences will give you an idea about how broad or niche your space is as well as the competition and innovation in your space. More importantly, it will give you direct access to potential customers.
2. How much research is enough before you jump in?
The simple answer is when you start seeing diminishing returns i.e. as you conduct more surveys or conduct more interviews, when you start seeing the same patterns or hearing the same problems over and over again, it means that you’ve landed on your customer’s biggest problems. Hearing the same problems validates your hypothesis and helps your prioritize which of your problem statements should make it to your MVP.
3. How to run experiments with a limited budget?
There are several tools available online for you to start experimenting your hypothesis with customers. You can also conduct self-driven market research panels for user research by inviting users of different segments to answer non-leading questions and compare and learn from the responses.
4. When do you use intuition versus customer research?
This is a grey area for many decision makers and can sometimes make or break a product. The rule of thumb is, when identifying the Customer problem, always lead from the customer voice. There is no greater truth than the voice of the customer. However when you are coming up with the solution, that’s where the creativity comes in. Think as big as you can, think outside the box, think in ways no one has before.
5. What is the best sample size for a survey?
There is no magic number for sample sizes of surveys. For products with a narrow target audience, a qualitative study with 30–50 surveys would go a long way. For large consumer companies with many different segments and sizes of customer segments, running a survey with 200–300 customers with unbiased questions can help you narrow down common patterns or themes. This would give you a narrow group to diver deeper with, with good qualitative questions.
Iterate, Iterate, Iterate
In conclusion, there is no denying the value of thorough user research. However user research is not a one time investment, instead it is an ongoing activity that every product team should engage in periodically to keep up with the pulse of the customer. Keep testing and iterating on your product until you find the magic combination that leads to success.
