Product managing the customer empathy!

People often ask — “So what does it take to be a great product manager?”

Product managers, as we know, are responsible for understanding the customer needs, creating delightful value (product / experiences) with an intent to make their customers successful and hence helping grow business for the company.

There are several skills that make a good product manager — skills like data driven decision making, structured thinking and creative problem solving for simplifying the complex and ambiguous ‘customer requirements’, staging these requirements into ‘minimal lovable products’ and the multi sprint ‘product roadmaps’, designing meaningful customer experiences, creating strong business proposals to align stakeholders, exercising technical depth to make strategic tradeoffs, applying business acumen to drive the go to market strategy and tracking success of the products.

One skill that is paramount and is needed in all stages of product management is ‘customer empathy ‘— but easier said than done; it is also one of the most difficult ones to acquire.

Let’s work on a case study together to understand this better.

Case Study — The parking problem

‘Off-late I am receiving a few complains from my loyal customers that they aren’t finding parking space in my store forcing them to go elsewhere to buy their stuff. Can you please help me resolve the parking problem?’ — Prachi Mehta, business owner, convenience store.

You are a product manager who has been tasked to create a business proposal to solve Prachi’s problem.

Exercise #1 — Enumerate all possible approaches you will take to solve her problem?

Take a few minutes to think — A pen and paper to jot your thoughts before you move further will help.

Did you think of brainstorming ways with Prachi to innovatively solve her ‘parking’ problem? If yes, how many solutions could you think of?

1. Redesign parking to accommodate more cars and optimize navigation.
2. Make parking paid to stop misuse of parking by nearby dwellers.
3. Create a multi-storied parking to create more space.
4. Rent a parking spot near by.
5. Enable To Go / Delivery Pickups.
6. Enable an ecommerce website / app for order and home delivery.
7. What else? — Please post them as comments.

If you spent most of your energy on generating ideas, your thought process is dominated with the “How can we solve it?” mindset. Unfortunately, you lack the basics of customer empathy. Remember, anyone with an average intellect can generate tons of ideas. Not everyone is a great product manager.

One of the biggest mistakes some product managers make is to commit too soon that they understood customer problem and jump into building things that no one needs. Sometime they get biased with anecdotal feedback, sometime with temptations to adopt fast paced / hyped technology and sometimes to prove their quick worth to the leadership. All of this leading to unsatisfied customers and negative business results.

Think about it, is there any point selling your customer an automated paid parking solution or an online order management system if the real problem is elsewhere? When you do that, you earned yourself a disappointed customer and beyond this time most of your teams energy will go into finding more artificial solutions to improve her satisfaction rating.

Or, did you instead started thinking about the parking problem with an open mind and were curious to understand the problem holistically?

If yes, you are atleast on the right track. A good product manager will never be in hurry to find solutions, he will be patiently working to get customer signals and build a strong data-backed hypothesis around the problem itself. He would never start with “How can I solve it?” and will instead focus more on “Who is the customer?” and “What are her unmet and latent needs and why?”.

So in the process of understanding the real problem, did you think of interviewing Prachi, the store owner? If yes, what did you intend to ask her?

Exercise #2 — Enumerate all questions you would ask Prachi to understand her business problems better?

Take a few minutes to think — A pen and paper to jot your thoughts before you move further will help.

Were your questions more around understanding the feedback she received from her complaining customers? For example “Is your customer facing this problem every time or in some specific time slots?”, “What vehicles do they drive in?”, “Where do they go when they don’t find parking? Why that place?”, “When they are able to get parking and shop with you, what part of experiences do they like?”, “What part of the experiences do they think you can improve on?”, “what else?”

Or did you also make an attempt to understand other aspects as well? For example, how many of the following questions did you frame?

1. “How many customers are coming to the store daily, weekly, monthly?”, “What’s the trend looking month over month?”
2. “How much time are they spending in the store?”, “What’s the split of time per section in their journey? for example — How much time are they spending in parking, shopping, billing etc.”, “Any feedback from them?”
3. “Cohorts of customers who are spending most time in the store? What activities are they doing?”, “Any feedback from them?”
4. “Cohorts of most frequent customers? What activities are they doing?”, “Any feedback from them?”
5. “Is there any visible impact of dropping customers on the business?”
6. “What else?” — please post them as comments.

A lot of time customers won’t tell you the real problems. Sometimes they themselves don’t know it — making it even more ambiguous. This is the reason we need good product managers who can ask right probing questions and surface the right problem. Talking to Prachi is a good first step but may not be good enough to understand the real problem. So it is time to interact with more customers.

Exercise #3 — Enumerate all people who come to your mind in context of the parking problem?

Take a few minutes to think — A pen and paper to jot your thoughts before you move further will help.

Who all did you think of?

1. The customers who dropped out because of the parking problem?
2. The loyal customers who are still visiting?
3. Local customers who visit other similar shops nearby?
4. The parking staff?
5. The store staff?
6. The billing staff?
7. All of them?
8. Who else? — please post them as comments.

In order to create right customer value, it is extremely important to take a holistic view of your customers. Every customer segment you miss, takes you farther away from the real problems. A lot of times the problem you observe is a manifestation of one or more hidden problems. For example, it is a possibility that the parking problem was a manifestation of an inefficient store management leading people to spend unnecessary time in the store and hence creating bottleneck in parking.

Interacting with diverse set of people like “Loyal customers”, “customer who dropped off”, “store staff ”, “billing staff” etc. in this case would help you find patterns helping you create a strong hypothesis around the problem . For example, you could find — “One of the root causes of the parking problem is the long waiting queues during the weekends specially between 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm. If we add an additional self-checkout billing counter, the parking problem will be reduced by 70%”.

Let’s take the process of understanding the real problem to the next level — let’s get ready to interact with a diverse set of customers.

Exercise #4 — Enumerate the questions you would ask the the diverse set of customer segments to understand the real problem?

Take a few minutes to think — A pen and paper to jot your thoughts before you move further will help.

Did you think of reaching out to all customers and directly asking them “What is your problem?”, “What are your top three problems etc. etc.?” — if yes, you have ‘started thinking’ about your customers. Good job, but that’s what all average product managers do.

Did you think of taking an structured approach towards customer research (interviews, surveys, store walkthrough etc.) to understand their end to end customer journeys (from parking to entering the store to putting items on cart to billing to exiting the store and there by the parking. “What parts of experiences did they like and why”, “What parts to experience they are their current pain points, have they done to escalate this problem or solve it differently or they felt annoyed and dropped off?”. — if yes, you have ‘started caring’ for your customers and you can award yourself a badge of ‘customer empathy’ as you are on a good path to understand and solve your customers unmet needs.

Did you instead think of taking an approach to understand the shopping needs, behaviors and habits of your current and potential future customers? “What does a day in life for them look like?”, “What triggers an intent for shopping?”, “How often do they shop?”, “What do they shop?”, “What brings them to your store?”, “Do they shop elsewhere?”, “How do they compare experiences?”, “Do they care about difference in experiences? If yes, why?” — if yes, you have ‘started obsessing’ for your customers and you are on a good path not only to solve your customers unmet needs but also to understand and solve their latent needs. You are a great product manager in making.

Recap:

So you see, lack of customer empathy would have lead us to solve the incorrect problem of ‘parking’ in innovative ways “multi-level parking”, “leasing more space”, “paid parking to avoid misuse”, “automated ticketed system” etc. while the real problem could have been elsewhere like billing counter, shopping area, inadequate staffing or something completely different. Remember, a lot of times the problem or the unmet need you observe is a manifestation of one or more hidden problems.

The bigger challenge for product managers is to spot latent needs of their customers — Latent need is a customer need that isn’t currently served by the market and isn’t actively requested by customers. It is actually a need that customers don’t know they have. Remember, if business were built only on what people asked, there’s wouldn’t have smartphones. Two decades back, people would have never imagined that some innovations which they never thought they needed, has become their hard to part with companion.

While “thinking” about customers to “caring” to “obsessing” about them comes from years of experience, a little change in mindset of starting with “who” and “why” instead of “how” helps go a long way.

Here are a few tips you can use to build customer empathy:

1. You and your team of product developers are not the customers! Take time to understand who your real customers are? Every customer segment you miss takes you farther away for the real customer needs.
2. Interact with a lot of customers — interact until you start hearing repeated patterns — Interact until customers have nothing new to add.
3. Ask open ended questions — rather than asking “how do you use the product?”, “what are your top pain points?” start with understanding “a day in their life”, “What products do they use and why?” — don’t limit it to just your product.
4. Allow them to tell their stories without inhibition — How do products they use make them successful? What product behaviors they love versus what frustrates them?
5. Observe emotions — don’t just get satisfied with ‘what’ they are saying? Probe to understand ‘why’ they are saying it.
6. Don’t feed them what you want to hear — “do you think blah feature will help you be productive while scheduling a meeting?”

Let me know in the comments section if this was useful or if you have any questions. Happy to address them.