The wealth of knowledge most teams don’t tap into.
When you have a product that’s out in the world, whether you’re an early stage startup or an established organization, there’s a wealth of raw material you can tap into. We all know meaningful innovation and product iteration requires keeping a pulse on your customers and understanding their unmet needs.
Your customers are your best source of data. Yet, most product iteration starts on the fly, most new features starting off as an idea from someone on the team, without fully understanding if and how your customers will benefit from it. What that leads to is product teams functioning more like feature factories, shipping idea after idea and then wondering why they aren’t seeing any meaningful traction. And this makes sense, because you’d rather fail quickly and learn through experimentation, than spend months on research. But the truth is, product failures are neither fast nor cheap.
The reason product teams often shy away from research is because it’s time consuming and often doesn’t produce tangible outcomes. For a company that’s trying to move quickly, developing personas and partaking in long drawn research projects can feel like a drab and a waste of time. But it doesn’t have to be that way. There’s a lot you can learn from your customers (both your best customers and your worst ones) that can help inform product direction and shine light on worthwhile ideas. And you can do this in a really short amount of time.
At N5, we run 3 day research sprints to maximize learnings in a really short amount of time and help answer questions such as:
1. Do prospects understand the value of our product?
2. Why are customers not using our product or a particular feature?
4. What are the biggest pain points and workflow issues customers experience?
5. Why is repeat usage so low?
6. What do our users care about the most?
7. What’s the most important thing for us to get right?
I’ll share our process for how we organize and conduct research sprints in another post.
Quick problem discovery can expose you to a whole new world of possibilities for the future of your product. Opportunities you might be overlooking, simply by not tapping into the wealth of raw material that’s already accessible to you.
Research doesn’t have to be a long process requiring weeks of interviews and synthesis. Run fast, effective and impactful research quickly. Because your next big idea could come from your customers. Research alone though is not enough, and there’s no replacement for tangible prototypes and customer feedback to help de-risk your big bets.
A small time investment in getting to know your customers can ensure that you are optimizing for the right problems, help eradicate bad ideas and set you on the path to disruptive innovation.
