How does user research help in solving real world problems in Product Management
“Supposing is good but finding out is better” - Mark Twain
The above quote clearly describes the importance of user research for any product a Product Manager builds. When we talk about how empathy is a critical skill for a good product manager, what one needs to understand is the fine line between putting yourself in the user’s shoes and talking to the user to see how he/she feels.
As soon as I joined Rupeek, one thing was clear in my mind. I wanted my users to be at the center of the products that I build. Hence, user research was something I was excited about. It was my first on-ground user research as a Product Manager, where I was going to meet users, watch them using our products, experience a live customer transaction and see how all the products we have built so far connect in real life.
So, let us first understand the business model of Rupeek in terms of what it does and how is it done currently?
Rupeek is a digital lending fintech platform which gives gold loan to customers across PAN India. So a customer can book a gold loan with Rupeek, a Loan Manager from Rupeek will go to the customer’s place, check the documents, book the loan, make the payment and bring the gold to be stored in the vaults.
Now, Rupeek being a platform, caters to multiple types of users which include Customers, Loan Managers, Release Managers, Vault Officers, etc, So as a part of this user research, I wanted to meet each of these user types and understand how their day to day life looks like while they perform various activities using our products and processes. My main focus was to understand the pain points that the users are facing currently and find any gaps in the existing processes.
User research is a perfect combination of several planned activities and a sequence of impromptu moves depending on the way a user replies or reacts while using our product.
Any user research can be broadly divided into four steps:
- The first step is to establish a goal for the user research that you want to conduct. It can include understanding the existing user problems, gauging the market for a business idea, getting feedback on a new product, or measuring the user satisfaction for the existing products.
2. The second step is to decide on the approach you want to take to do this user research. It includes choosing one or more research methods such as one-to-one interviews, shadowing a user, etc., and preparing the questionnaires, schedules, and tracker for the research. The outcomes and the metrics to be tracked have to be listed clearly. The scope of this research also needs to be defined in this step.
3. The third step is the most important step where user research happens. You go out, meet users, talk to them, understand their problems, and go deeper into analyzing their problems. User research is generally planned in a very detailed manner most of the time, you will still have to improvise depending on last-minute changes, unexpected user reactions, or the revelation of information which is very critical for your research.
4. The final step includes analyzing all the data and information that you have discovered during the whole process and consolidating them using different buckets depending on your needs. And then derive actionable insights which can be discussed with various stakeholders and acted upon depending on the severity of the problem.
I started my user research by accompanying a Loan Manager for a loan to the customer. It was interesting because while shadowing a Loan Manager, I was trying to understand the whole process from the perspective of both the Loan Manager and the Customer. It was like cascaded research where the customer experience directly depended on the user experience of the Loan Manager while using Rupeek’s products and processes.
For this part, all I was doing was shadowing the Loan Manager, carefully watching his actions, expressions, and any other information that he wanted to convey. I was noting down all the doubts and queries I encountered, to be asked after the completion of the loan transaction.
After the loan was processed, I accompanied him to the vault to see the process of how the gold is submitted there, and then I had a one-to-one discussion with him about the whole process. It was a very informal discussion where I asked him my doubts, questioned him on his pain points and, any other suggestions he had. I probed him further into some of his problems and replies he gave where I felt that it could lead to some critical insights.
I then shadowed four other Loan Managers for a different type of loans and by the end of it, I had a fair idea about a Loan Manager’s day to day work life, his pain points with current products, his problems and I was able to build a User Persona for a Rupeek Loan Manager as well.
I followed the same process by meeting vault officers at vaults. Firstly I observed the current processes and products that they are using in a vault and it was followed by a detailed interview to understand their problems. Since there are different types of loans as well as different use cases that are currently in place to store gold in the vaults, understanding the vault operations was very critical from the perspective of building any product for Vault Officers going forward.
This user research took around two weeks where I shadowed Loan Managers to live customer loans, had a detailed discussion with them to understand the current gaps. Then I visited 5 vaults across the city to see the vault operations and talk to Vault Officers to understand the major issues they are facing currently.
Going out and talking to users, seeing them use the products gave me a real picture of what is happening on the ground — their problems, their frustrations, their aspirations, and most importantly their persona. This will help me build something that actually will impact the user’s life in a very positive way where it makes a difference.
As a Product Manager, I get a lot of data from the analytics team about the latest trend, business insights from the business team that what should be built, suggestions from the marketing team that user may like this, but my only criteria for building a product remains that what is the problem that I am solving for the user if I am building this product.
Also, user research is not something you do only once, it is a never-ending process that continues till you keep building products for the users. Because as Julie Zhou rightly said it — “To find ideas, find problems. To find problems, talk to people”
