Make Product Planning Research-oriented
Starting 2018, I will share some behind-the-scenes thoughts and reflections that go into various projects related to product design, user experience, and branding as we continue to build our product to better serve people in accumulating long-term wealth through investing.
Understanding customer needs and improving the customer experience should always be a priority for customer-centric organisations. This is especially true in the digital environment where customer experience is the bread and butter of your brand. At StashAway, we’ve always put a huge emphasis on research and learning from day one when it comes to product planning and development, which has enabled us to gain knowledge faster through constant experiments and iterations.
How research insights can help with product planning
Product planning is a hard problem, sometimes with huge risks. Most product failures in the market are due to either misconception of markets and customer needs, or misallocation of resources to low-impact, high effort features. Most of the risk related to product feature planning can be mitigated through research, as gathered and synthesised information can be a very powerful tool in understanding priorities and validating assumptions.
Get internal validation through collaboration
The first point of research, and often the least effort, is through internal validation. While not as good as researching real customers, internal validation can help the team uncover potential risk points and areas to focus on for further external validation through customer research.
Internal validation can be done in a number of ways. One of the most effective ways to seek internal validation is through design exploration workshops.
Gain support through knowledge sharing
Research insights can be a powerful tool to align understanding within the organization. Inviting all relevant stakeholders into a customer research presentation can help everyone working directly or indirectly on the project gain knowledge about the customers and understand pain points. In addition, keeping everyone informed of the research outcome helps building a customer-centric mindset and culture that goes a long way.
Explore multiple channels for customer feedback
Customer research shouldn’t be restricted to only user interviews. There are many alternative channels to explore when trying to reach your customer to get their precious feedback. Some of the channels we have implemented at StashAway are surveys, direct emailing to solicit feedback, a process for customer support team to escalate relevant feedback to the product team, app reviews, and online reviews in addition to our regular and ad-hoc user testing sessions.
Reduce friction when soliciting feedback
The last thing you want is to make customers refrain from giving feedback because there is too much friction in the process. Therefore, it is well worth the effort to design and implement a seamless and integrated process into various communication channels, and the product itself, for better feedback gathering. Since friction kills conversion, we’ve put lots of thoughts into our feedback channels to make sure there’s minimum friction when a customer is giving feedback.
We are constantly on the lookout for great talents to join our team . Visit our website to learn more and feel free to reach out to us!
