Series Overview
Getting the most out of your digital product starts with understanding the lived experiences of those using it, and using this to identify any challenges and areas for improvement.
Having this objective approach reduces ‘design by committee’ or ‘too many cooks’ and helps you to avoid following the HIPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion), in favour of delivering meaningful change that has measurable impact.
At Huddle, I run a series of workshops that enable our clients to do just this, and in this Think Like a Product Manager series, I share key takeaways from these workshops, along with tips and advice on how you fit these processes into your existing role.
Note: These articles are not designed for full-time product managers, but rather people who have found themselves with this responsibility and are trying to do this effectively alongside other role commitments.
The series is split into four articles, outlined below.
1. Research
An overview of UX and user research tips and techniques, such as surveys, 1-on-1 interviews, and more.
You are here!
2. Problem framing
How to make sense of research findings to uncover the right problems to solve and some useful brainstorming tools.
3. Solution ideation
Three techniques for problem-solving and coming up with creative ideas.
4. Prioritisation
We will take all of the raw ideation materials obtained so far and rewrite them as discrete actionable ideas.
Effective Problem Framing
Following the previous article, you should now find yourself with a set of research data.
This could be interview transcripts, survey responses, analytics data, anecdotal observations, and anything else that will uncover the reality of how your product is being used.
Once you have this, you may need help sifting through and making sense of it. This is where you may need to recruit colleagues to help organise and interpret the data. This usually works best by setting aside a one-off bumper session, where you get together for 2-3 hours to go through everything and come out the other end with clear findings and problems to solve. (It helps if you offer coffees and some of those M&S brownie bites).
Making sense of it all
Once you are ready to tackle the research findings, I suggest using a technique called Affinity Mapping.
This will require you to have some kind of shared whiteboard space, post-its and pens (ideally a physical whiteboard or wall, but you can use online tools too).
Step 1
The first step in this process is a free for all – don’t worry about structure or organisation just yet. As you’re going through your data, pick out individual problems or findings, for example:
- User A found the website difficult to navigate
- Ken from finance wants more export options in the CRM
- Mobile usability is poor
- Rashid wants the ability to add PDFs to the website
Each of these represents a post-it that you will stick on the board – anywhere you want. At this stage you need to be a bit of a downer – revealing as many of the issues and problems that you can.
Step 2
Once you are happy you’ve exhausted all the findings in the research, you can set aside this data and focus on the problems on the board.
The next step is for you and your colleagues to organise these into groups. The way you do this is very subjective, and will likely change if you were to run this exercise again.
Natural groups will emerge, and it’s usually best not to be too prescriptive – let your group naturally sort them. You don’t actually have to name the groups yet as we will do this in the next step. You want to aim for a handful of overall groups.
Once finished, you will have several groups of problems. This technique helps to identify themes from a large volume of information, making it easier to analyse and draw conclusions.
How might we…?
The following step is to take each of these groups and come up with an open-ended How Might We question, the answer to which will be potential solutions to the problems in the group.
The structure of these questions (open-ended, optimistic, human-centred) helps to facilitate brainstorming sessions and collaborative discussions by focussing on possibilities rather than constraints.
How Might We questions are used throughout Product Management and are very effective at reframing problems into opportunities, switching your mindset from critical to creative, and galvanising a team to come up with new ideas (which we’ll cover in the next article).
Some example How Might We questions include:
- How might we improve the usability on mobile?
- How might we help people find what they’re looking for more easily?
- How might we improve options to export data from the system?
- How might we present our brand effectively to an international audience?
- How might we better organise our articles?
At the end of this process, you will have several How Might We questions.
Don’t be afraid to experiment with this – adjust the process based on your team and how you all work best. Making sure the process is enjoyable and worthwhile for participants makes a huge difference to everyone’s buy-in, not to mention the end result.
What’s next?
We’ll take these forward into the next step, which is arguably the most fun and creative step: coming up with new ideas. Stay tuned for the next article Easy Ideation Exercises.
