Listen to your customers, talk to your customers… has probably become your motto as a product manager. After all, giving people what they want will guarantee success — or so you would think. When you conduct user interviews most often than not, the customers offer up solutions of what they want. It will be nice to have alerts, it should have a note taking feature etc. You take those to your team as must have features but when the product or service is launched, the marketplace welcomes it with a resounding kerflop. It leaves you wondering about how that happened.
The answer is quite simple, you can’t trust customers with solutions.
Customers aren’t supposed to be experts and are oblivious to the innovation process. Moreover, their solutions always stem from what they have already experienced. So now you must be wondering, how do you build what customers really want ? The answer is to focus on the outcomes they want to achieve through the requests that they are making. Why do they need alerts or the notes feature ? What form the solutions take should be up to you. When you go deeper into the “why”, you will be able to understand the problem better and hence come up with better solutions. They don’t want a drill, they want the hole.
If you think, that in your next interview you will just go and ask users, what do you want to achieve and they will give you all the right answers, then building great products wouldn’t be so hard.There may be a lot of difference between what customers say they want and what they actually want. Most times they are unaware of their behavior. If you start listening to your customers too closely, without peeling the layers, you will find yourself just delivering incremental improvements rather than bold ones, leaving the field open for competitors. You may fall prey to listening to recommendations of “lead user” who have an advanced understanding of the product or are not an accurate representation your user base.
Below are the steps that one should follow when planning and conducting these interviews:
Step 1: Plan the customer interviews.
It is crucial to narrow interviewees to specific groups of people directly involved with the product. Having too many stakeholders can divert the focus and prevent reaching statistical significance. You may have conducted over 25 interviews but there is very little or no affinity between pain points, solutions etc. After identifying the right groups, you need to ensure that each group has a diverse set of individuals so that you can understand the problems from each of your users.
Step 2: Conducting the interviews:
Observe the behaviours of users rather than just focusing on what they tell you. Based on the premise above, you need a moderator who can capture desired outcomes and weed out solutions, vague statements, anecdotes or irrelevant comments.
As the moderator captures a handful of customer statements and adjectives, they should translate each one into a desired outcome. It is crucial to ask deeper questions to get to that outcome. The moderator should address one statement at a time, rephrasing it to be free from solutions — words that inherently describe specifications or constraints — or ambiguities (words such as “easy,” “reliable,” and “comfortable”). Then the moderator confirms the translations with the userto eliminate guesswork after the interview ends. A well-formatted outcome contains both the type of improvement required (minimize, increase) and a unit of measure (time, number, frequency) so that the outcome statement can be used later in benchmarking, competitive analysis, and concept evaluation.
After completing 25–30 interviews depending on different personas that your user base has, you should have captured about 95–96% of the desired outcomes. You can do an affinity mapping exercise with the internal team to remove duplicates and categorise outcomes into groups.
Step 3: Rate outcomes for importance and satisfaction.
Once you have consolidated the list of desired outcomes, you can send a survey to your user groups where they are asked to rate each outcome in terms of its importance and the degree to which the outcome is currently satisfied. Once you have the scores, they act as priority for execution. The data will also help you conclude that some of the initiatives are likely to fail, so it can be suspended to prevent further work on them.
The process of innovation begins with identifying the outcomes customers want to achieve; it ends in the creation of items they will buy.
