What is a Product Manager?
At Huddle, we support clients with their digital products day in and day out – websites, customer portals, subscription platforms, back office systems, intranets, and so on.
Sometimes, we work with Product Managers – people who are solely responsible for managing these platforms within our clients’ businesses.
Although often we work with people who have adopted this role (among many others!) and find themselves responsible for a digital product within their organisation, without any real training on how to make sure that their product is performing to its fullest, making customers happy, and meeting stakeholder requirements.
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.
You are here!
1. Research
An overview of UX and user research tips and techniques, such as surveys, 1-on-1 interviews, and more.
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.
Simple Research Techniques
About 15 years ago I studied for a master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction (the less-trendy academic cousin of UX research).
Part of my final project involved observing how people used iPads to complete various tasks (quite a new technology back then).
At the time I assumed everybody used technology in the same way as me, but I remember being constantly astounded as I watched people use completely different strategies and tactics than I would, while achieving the same end result. In this moment I really understood what UX designer and consultant Whitney Hess meant when she said:
“You can’t design someone’s user experience, you can only design for someone’s user experience.”
Whitney Hess, UX designer and consultant
The case for research
Any form of learning about your product, how it is used, and what people want from it, will benefit you.
Once you see a user struggling with a particular area of the product, or hear a great improvement suggestion from a stakeholder, you won’t be able to “unlearn” that information and you will inevitably incorporate it into your ongoing work on the product, even if subconsciously.
Naturally, user research can be a full-time job, so in this article I’m just going to cover simple, accessible techniques you can use to bootstrap a research process within your organisation. The goal here isn’t to get completely air-tight definitive insights, but to widen your awareness of how people use your product, gather context, and learn more about what is at stake.
Remember – research sounds like a fancy term, but you don’t need to wait for permission to start speaking to your customers and learning more about their experience.
Surveys
Probably the easiest place to start is user surveys. You can use Google Forms, Typeform or Jotform for free (among others) to create surveys to gather data from your users and stakeholders.
If you are new to user research I would recommend keeping the surveys brief but useful, to make them quick to create, quick to fill in, and quick to analyse the resulting data.
I’d recommend between 5-10 questions for your first survey, and unless you have a reason to collect someone’s name and personal information, keep it completely anonymous to encourage responses.
Quantitative data (numbers) will be the easiest to glean insights from, though qualitative data (free text) can provide valuable depth to the responses. For example, if you are looking for feedback on your company website, try questions like the below.
Quantitative question examples:
On a scale of 1-5… How easy is it to find information on our website?”
On a scale of 1-5… How usable is our website on your smartphone?”
On a scale of 1-5… How likely are you to recommend our website to someone?”
Qualitative question examples:
“What is your favourite/least favourite part of the website?”
“What do you wish you could do on the website?”
“What are some of your most used websites and what do you like about them?”
Survey tips
Distributing your survey can seem daunting at first, especially to customers or end users, but remember:
- Customers and clients will appreciate you going the extra mile to accommodate them and learn how you can better service them – there is even a PR angle to shout about how you are working in a customer-centred way.
- Nobody knows how many or few responses you have got, so even if you fear nobody will respond, you’ve got nothing to lose (except a bit of time).
- Even if you learn some uncomfortable truths about your website, it’s much better to have this objective knowledge as opposed to a sneaking suspicion that people have criticisms about the product. Get it out in the open and it’s much easier to talk about internally.
Surveys can be set up and distributed in an afternoon, as long as you keep it simple and don’t think about it too much at this stage. It then may take you another afternoon a few weeks later to digest and analyse the results.
1-on-1 Interviews
A common adage in product management is to “Speak to a customer a day” (or a customer a week, or a customer a month).
Not only does this give you insight into the customer experience, but it reframes your whole mindset when working with your product (and indeed when at your workplace in general).
The most effective and pain-free way to do this is on the phone (bear with me). This may seem scary at first, but you’d be surprised at how many people will be receptive to this phone call, if you go about it the right way.
Let them know you will call in advance and give them the option to opt-out. Here’s an example email you can use the day before you call.
Hi Blank,
I work for Company X and can see you have recently placed a few orders with us over the years, most recently for Product X on 15th June.
We are currently reaching out to some selected customers to learn more about how we can improve our website.
I’d love to learn more about your experience, to help us make improvements to make it even better for you.
I’m going to give you a call on 07XXXXXXX tomorrow at 8:45am just to ask you a couple of quick questions. The call should only last 10 minutes.
If you’d rather I didn’t do this, please let me know.
Look forward to chatting tomorrow.
Tom
Interview tips
Speaking to people about this can be scary, so here are some tips to get you started.
- Firstly, make sure you are calling people who have given signals that they are genuinely into your product or service. Maybe they have made repeat purchases, or they’ve been a client for a long time, or they cared enough to leave you a review.
- Call someone at a time that they may be more likely to have the time and inclination to pick up – maybe around lunchtime or nearing the end of the day.
- Don’t try to identify people who will give you only good feedback, or only bad feedback. Simply find someone who you feel will want to talk to you, and go for it.
- You may want to do this just once a week, maybe on a Friday (when everyone is in a good mood). Try to carve out a pocket of time on the Thursday to find a random eligible user, email them, and then make the call the next day.
If you can commit to doing this just four times in a month, I promise that you will see the value and want to continue. Even if you can only do this once a month, or once every 2 months, or whatever, speaking to just one user is better than speaking to none.
More techniques
For brevity I have kept this post to just two techniques that I feel will deliver the biggest impact to your perception of your product, both from the insights and also the process of inviting users to feed back on the product.
There are more techniques that are also valuable during this process:
- Behaviour analytics tools like Google Analytics, Fathom or Hotjar
- Sentiment analysis (e.g. for customer reviews) like Medallia, Idiomatic or Talkwater
- ChatGPT is also pretty good at analysing data – with the paid version you can upload CSV data and simply ask for insights.
- User observation – if you have enough time you can invite users into your office and ask them to complete various tasks using your product (e.g. “find information about X” or “add a new shopping list”), then simply observe what they do and make notes.
Consider which data you need
One important consideration with user research is data protection.
Make sure you are only gathering the data you actually need for your research (do you need someone’s name?) and that you only keep it for as long as is necessary (once you have actioned the findings, you could delete the original data).
Make sure all gathered data is self-contained, anonymised where possible, and easily found and deleted when it is no longer needed.
Wrap-up
Hopefully in this article I’ve both sold the value of user research while also demonstrating it can be very accessible even for people who aren’t full-time researchers.
Creating, distributing and analysing a survey might take a couple of afternoons, and calling a customer a month is maybe 30 minutes’ time each week.
If you are struggling to see how you can fit these activities in, can you commit to doing this for 1 month and then review at the end? You may find that user research is not for you (that’s absolutely fine!) or you might get the bug and want to continue.
What’s next?
Once you have your survey data and interview notes, you will need to know how to use these to move forward and make improvements.
Upon looking at the findings, it may seem like you are being presented with a host of problems and you’re not sure where to start. This is completely normal. In the next article in the series – Effective Problem Framing – we will cover how you can take research findings and decide which problems to solve, which to ignore, and how to prioritise.
