How to Make Rockstar 🤩️ Product Decisions
Listening to Individuals vs. Aggregating Data
Lately, all I have been hearing is data, data, data… that before making a decision about whether to start a new business, create a new product, or add a new feature to a product, we need data to back up our decisions with data. But “data” does not always mean numbers in a chart; some of the most valuable data product managers can receive is long, unstructured text that gives details and context. So how do we balance listening to individual customers and aggregating data in order to make good product and business decisions?
I recently attended a product management class where the teacher explained that a good strategy for prioritizing product decisions is to consider the following equation: Prioritization = Severity x Breadth (or Breadth x Severity). This equation has stuck with me, and I believe it is something that we can apply to the question at hand. I would suggest that severity is found and understood by listening to individual customers (whether through conversations or reading free-form feedback), while breadth is determined by analyzing aggregated data. For example, I heard from one customer that they stopped using my app because it did not sync with their Google Calendar. Attrition is a pretty severe problem for my business, so the severity of not having this feature is high for this one user. However, in order to determine the overall priority of this feature, I have to first understand the breadth of the calendar problem by understanding how many customers find my app unusable or its valuable proposition wanting because it doesn’t integrate with Google Calendar. Once I understand severity and breadth, I can then make a good decision.
Listening to the Individual
There are several ways we can listen to our customers. Sometimes that may be through one-on-one interviews, listening to customer service calls, or reading customer feedback. No matter the medium of communication, this is still an opportunity to determine severity by seeking to understand our customers. From these interactions we can learn, as Clayton Christensen would say, what the “job to be done” is for our customers. We can learn if this job is costing our customers time or money, or if it is causing them any kind of emotional or social discomfort. In other words, we can figure out how painful or severe the job to be done is. This is what I have heard referred to as a nugget, one data point that gives us a new perspective than we had before. Nuggets are great! However, only one or two data points alone is usually not sufficient to base our product decisions.
Aggregating Data
This brings us to the importance of analyzing aggregated data. This can be done through customer surveys, aggregating customer feedback, or by tracking other relevant data such as page clicks or usage. The type of data you need will depend on the insights gained from listening to individuals. For example, if we discovered through a customer interview that someone had difficulty purchasing a product on our website, we should then find out how many other people are having this same or similar problem. To do so, we might use Unbird to aggregate and review all of our customer feedback to determine the breadth of this problem. In other words, analyzing aggregated data allows us to validate if the nuggets we found by listening to our customers are actually common themes across our customer base or one-off issues. At any point in product, there are more issues you could address than you have time, so this is important!
Making decisions about what to do next can be daunting. However, by listening to customers and validating what was learned by analyzing aggregated data, it is possible to make rockstar product decisions.
