🧭 Fixing our product-market compass

I’ve recently begun to inject (or attempt to) good Product Management techniques and practices at Persona, in order to really deliver value to our users and solve their problems.

To give you an idea of the problem we have right now, we currently have 2,671 users at the time of writing, and 61 active users. Seems like certain death, right?

For those numbers, we use Intercom. A fantastic service that allows us to keep in-touch with our users and follow our users’ journeys through our applications.

The Persona products are based around assisting jobseekers and people who help them find work, communicate job opportunities.

The mistakes that we have made are:

• Not having a strong focus on doing one thing well for our users, in the early days.
• Not fully understanding our users (their daily activities, pains and anxieties around carrying out their activities).
• Not “getting out of the office” enough.
• Not correlating features to user problems and defining what success looks like for a feature.

So what we’re left with now is a big product with no direction and dormant users.

Communication is key. To tackle this problem, I decided to talk. I sent an email to all of our users that asked them directly about the problems about the process of finding a job. Even though 97% of our users are dormant, we managed get insightful responses.

Following that, I opened the conversation with follow-up emails and with some phone calls — to begin user interviews. The aim of this was to begin to rebuild our image of our users, this time we need to understand the real full picture: what they do on a day-to-day basis, why they do those things and why in that way, what environment and tools they work in and with.

I’m writing this a week after carrying out the above, so we haven’t had impacted the product as a result of this, yet. However, the team feels more confident that we are more familiar with our users and it feels less like we are building something for aliens.

This doesn’t stop here though. People change, and so we must have a fluid image of our users that changes as they do and not only must we understand how they have change, but we must also understand why they have changed. So, this method of learning about our users will continue. With the help of tools like Intercom, we can be more familiar with our users and fix our product-market compass to get to our North Star!