For most product leaders, a dream role involves setting the product roadmap. But once you snag a role with that sort of autonomy, the overwhelm can set in. What should the roadmap be? The answer depends not only on what the business is striving to do, but also on what users need.
In fact, Daniel Elizalde, a coach and advisor who has worked with 1500+ product professionals, recently said that when he asks product leaders about their biggest challenge, the answer is usually the same: understanding the users’ needs.
Said another way: If you’re worried that you don’t fully understand users’ needs, you’re not alone. In another blog post, Co-founder Brant Young and I almost made the same mistake in my mom’s bathroom.
Why do product teams struggle to understand users’ needs, and what should they do about it?
The specific obstacles can vary based on the size of the company, the values of its leadership team and the maturity of the market it serves. Here are some of the most common issues.
1. Company leaders believe the company “already understands” the users.
Most founders take the risk of starting a company because they believe strongly that there’s an opportunity to earn money by solving a problem. Often, this is a problem they understand well and have seen or experienced firsthand. These types of founders might not believe they need to conduct research, because they think they know the problem well. And this might be true at first, but with time, it becomes less true:
New hires don’t understand the problem the same way the leaders do.
The market/audience changes over time.
They become so close to their own solutions that it obscures the crisp understanding they once had.
Leaders who believe the company “already understands users” are one of the toughest groups to change. They hesitate to invest time and money in user research, forcing product leaders to build a case for it. Working in this environment can be a slog.
If you find yourself in this position, focus on gathering user insight however you can. Interview sales and support teams. Review chat logs or inbound support tickets. Parse user interface analytics.
As you interact with this type of leader, bring facts–both facts that support their position as well as a few facts that might surprise them. This can help retrain the leaders that they don’t need to rely on their own first-hand knowledge to make decisions.
2. The target audience is not clearly defined.
Often, especially early on, a product has several potential audiences. Eager to earn revenue, teams sometimes hesitate to deprioritize any audience that might be willing to pay good money. But a lack of audience focus makes it impossible to understand the user needs thoroughly. A watered-down product experience is less compelling, and makes product decisions difficult.
A smart move in this scenario is to perform research with the express purpose of choosing an audience focus. While investigating two potential target audiences for one of our clients, our research revealed that users in one audience were willing to pay substantially less, wanted way more features, and were very likely to switch to a competitor than the other audience they were considering. This made it a no-brainer; the company decided to focus on the more lucrative, less demanding, and less fickle of the two audiences.
3. The product team doesn’t have the right skills.
Product leaders know that understanding users is important, but not every role affords an equal opportunity to learn the skills of product discovery.
In some companies, executives or large customers set the priorities, and the product team is expected to focus on getting stuff built.
In some organizations, other roles are performing lots of research. In small companies, a CEO might do a lot of firsthand discovery as they attempt to sell the product, sharing their learning with the team. In a larger organization, there might be full-time CX researchers assigned to gather information and report back.
Sometimes, a product leader’s discovery experience doesn’t translate to the new situation they find themselves in. For example, they may have been performing small-scale research with internal users, and are now tasked with understanding the needs of a large external audience.
If inadequate product discovery skills are getting in the way for you, you’ve got several options.
You can seek out external training.
You can seek mentorship from peers inside or outside of the company. If your organization is large enough, there may be others who have gone through the same learning curve and can guide you. But if not, there are plenty of folks out there who are willing to mentor, paid or unpaid.
You can hire an external team to help with the discovery you need to do, and learn from them along the way. Our clients often use projects with us to learn our methods. Most of the templates and processes we use are reusable if clients have the time to do it themselves.
4. Product managers don’t have time for adequate research.
The product team is often the glue that holds everything together in a lot of companies. You may be writing and clarifying specs, requirements, stories, or tickets. You may be managing JIRA backlogs, running agile rituals, and keeping teams unblocked. Not to mention the time you’re spending in meetings and developing presentations.
If a lack of time for adequate research is your obstacle, there are two things to consider:
Push on timelines. What’s driving the timelines that are pressuring you? Taking the time to work on the right things is important.
Hire others to help you. Screening, scheduling, incentivizing, and analyzing can take a ton of time. Professional user researchers and UX designers can handle the logistics of it all so that you can cut straight to the themes and representative clips.
At Slide UX, we use workshops, user research, and UX audits of existing experiences to be sure we truly understand the problem. Get in touch if you are in need of help.