On building a strong user research culture at Meesho and making our entrepreneurs successful
Guest Blog written by Achyutha Sharma, User Research Lead, Meesho
User research focuses on understanding our user’s behaviour, needs and motivation through qualitative and investigative research — to design the most relevant product at Meesho. User research becomes a critical starting point to understand why we are building our product, a particular feature, experiences and the value we create for Meesho entrepreneurs.
Meesho’s focus has always been to grow exponentially with our entrepreneurs, and remain innovative as a product company. Many startups in India often don’t recognise user research as a critical contributor to the complete cycle of product development. They usually consider user research at stages of testing a product for validation and launch, which defeats the purpose of developing a product that is user-centric.
Moving forward at Meesho, user research will support us in creating a relevant, useful product in a fast-changing consumer market, and this will help us connect back to our core value of making our entrepreneurs successful, which is our “True North”. We have good online resources that elaborates on need and value of user research for a company to grow and remain innovative.
At Meesho, the design team recognises the value of user research, not just to improve UX but also across business functions, in delivering the best product and experience. User research is a collective effort to continually understand our users/ entrepreneurs and constantly improve their experience with Meesho. Head of design at Meesho, Shayak Sen has spoken about the value and impact of user research here on a product company.
It is critical to continuously understand our growing users with less biases as it gives us authentic inputs that lead to product success.
So let’s bust a few myths on user research for a product/ technology focused company:
User research is not necessary if our product has already been successful before without any qualitative research
As the business scales, more users are on board and complexity of user experience increases making the initial product features less relevant. It is critical to continuously understand our growing users with less biases as it gives us authentic inputs that lead to product success. Qualitative research provides key insights that help us align our product with real needs and motivations of our users.
User research focuses on understanding our user’s behaviour, needs and motivation through qualitative and investigative research — to design the most relevant product at Meesho. User research becomes a critical starting point to understand why we are building our product, a particular feature, experiences and the value we create for Meesho entrepreneurs.
Talking to users is user research
Product, technology and even designers involved in building products come with their own biases and are often quick to find a solution. Talking to users or conducting a few surveys is NOT user research. User research is a specialised domain that requires neutrality and unbiased engagement with users. The intent is first to understand users, identify gaps, define problem statements and then validate ideas/ solutions.
There are other myths faced by startups such as user research is expensive, time consuming or required only for new initiatives or ideas.
Moving on, let’s look at how our user research contributes directly to the growth of Meesho:
Our users give us a strategic direction
User research at Meesho helps us understand how entrepreneurs leverage our platform, their motivation and how they achieve goals that are important to them. It gives us context and perspective, that allows us to respond with useful, simplified, and relevant solutions. Our product can be constantly improved when we discover and leverage user-centric insights continually. It’s not just insights to what solutions we should consider, but also what we don’t need to prioritise or implement in our product.
For example, a few of our top entrepreneurs have shared insights on how they leveraged our product features to get more orders which we didn’t intend to design for that purpose. And now, we are improving those features to create a better experience for entrepreneurs. We also discovered in our research, our entrepreneurs are not just homemakers, but also intelligent thoughtful professionals that carefully understand their customer’s lifestyle and needs. These entrepreneurs study local/ offline and online marketplaces, merchandise and design trends to gain more insights on what products are selling more, trending more that customers may look for.
The above mentioned user research examples also helps Meesho identify unarticulated needs and to fill in any gaps in our knowledge about our users, context of use, challenges, and opportunities. It becomes strategic in nature as we validate our assumptions and ideas with qualitative and quantitative research on users central to our product design. This will allow us to align our product and business strategy with the core needs and goals of our users.
Collaborative culture driving innovation
Every startup talks about innovation as the core of its product and company culture. But driving innovation constantly can be challenging. The culture of innovation requires cross-functional collaboration across teams to drive common goals. User research doesn’t function in silo of conducting qualitative research externally and then coming back to share results with teams. User research begins by understanding the system internally, aligning our research purposes across teams and gathering regular data internally that forms the basis of research on our entrepreneurs. The outcomes of user research aid teams to leverage user inferences for their own functions and in addition aligns them to common needs, gaps and opportunities in product experience for our users.
Incremental improvement leads to exponential growth
The cumulative development of a product is based on several small incremental changes at different stages and areas of product design. Each stage and each area of product improvement can collectively impact and bring immense value to our entrepreneurs experience. And this can include everything from personalisation of our top entrepreneurs, supporting entrepreneurs to increase customer base to wider choices of quality products, an engaging app experience, and helping entrepreneurs achieve their goals. The more depth we gain in understanding our diverse 2 million plus entrepreneurs, the more we improve our product to scale growth exponentially.
The future ahead
Our approach to user research at Meesho is more systemic and scalable, bringing diverse teams collaboratively together. We have three main priorities in the coming months:
Systems design & standardisation: Mapping across teams and functions of Meesho in detail that visualises the overall “system design”. This will allow the user research team to bring value within each function and also facilitate learning across teams for common goals. We are building a research architecture, standardising processes, documentation and access that will become a resource bank of insights on our users and product.
Entrepreneur research: Meesho’s focus has always been its entrepreneurs/ users and will continue to be so. We are deep diving into our users with qualitative research to enhance our understanding of our user’s context, needs and goals. This is going to help us continually improve our design and product experience for our entrepreneurs.
Project based research: Each team and function in Meesho is also understanding its users and there is scope of qualitative research in different areas of business and stages of users. We will continue to plan, execute and manage multiple user research projects going forward as per the project objectives.
We will be sharing more about us and our work in user research and design in coming weeks that will help you understand our Meesho journey.
And what we remind ourselves when we start a research project is “Every product idea/ solution is a hypothesis about our entrepreneurs, their needs, solution and relationship. We validate our assumptions and answer these questions through our research by carefully aligning the Meesho entrepreneurs’ needs and goals with its core value delivered through our products.”
Want to join Achyutha and team Meesho in helping create 20 million entrepreneurs by 2020? Then we are hiring across roles. Apply here!
