How Leveraging Concierge Test Technique Helped Us To Generate Better Product Idea
Recently I’ve been working with a product we built for our client, our customer was in need of a user to work on his diary stuff for awhile and I voluntarily helped them on it. Although it was a short-term opportunity doing the stuff customer does through our product, I came back with a bunch of fascinating product ideas and some of the new improvements on our product. Furthermore, working with our product as a real user helped me out on developing customer understanding and empathy that is so important for motivating product team in delivering strong solutions.
While I was at the frontier of seeing how users working with our product, I understood where they value most and what are the existing pains & constraints of customers working with our product.
As I was doing what a customer does, I surprisingly discovered some of the best product opportunities that have never been asked by our client during any interview sessions.
As Amazon’s Jeff Bezos said:
Some of the most tangible product ideas stem from your product intuition and the ability to assess product opportunities. If you are a product manager one of your important responsibility is to be able to harvest new opportunities effectively and to identify those that have the most potential for your company to build. Although there are many ways to discover new product ideas including: talking to your customers, looking at your data and etc… some of the high-quality product ideas will be generated at the time you are doing what your customers do through your product in practice and manually. Using this technique called “Concierge Test Technique” you would be able to develop customer understanding and empathy that is so important for motivating your product team on delivering strong solutions.
What is Concierge Test Technique?
Marty Cagan on his new book INSPIRED defined it as:
An effective technique to generate product idea by doing customer’s job for them, manually and personally.
With this technique, you do what the user would do with your product. You may have to ask them to train you first, but you are in their shoes doing the tasks customer does. You may think this is similar to spending some time with your customer or customer support staff, which is also valuable and often a good source of generating product idea, but that is not the same,since customer services staff mainly helps customers once they call with a problem, instead concierge test technique requires going out to the actual users and asking them to show you how they work so that you can learn to do their job, doing that you can work on providing them a much better solution.
If you are building a B2B product these users might be employees of the company you’ve built the product for, but the technique is the same, you go to users and ask them to teach you how they do their job through the product based on the principle of shared learning. To use the concierge test technique effectively the product manager could be accompanied by one of the engineers and designers from the product team to conduct the test.
