How to Be a Good Product Manager: Understand your Customer

Article in English

Product innovation and coveted organic growth are not possible without truly understanding your customers, which means understanding their social, emotional, and functional jobs to be done. The best place to start is understanding the problem, especially an optimization problem in existing data. This should be done on an ongoing basis, but in this article, I will go through it as if it’s a formal process. Having a defined approach like I am about to describe may help jump-start the process if it starts to stagnate.

Before chatting with customers, start with the data that is already in your clouds or servers if you still have those. This certainly includes Google Analytics, but a more holistic approach would extend to reviewing enterprise systems like CRM (Customer Relationship Management), customer interviews, surveys, ethnographic information, customer journey maps (ideal state), customer user flows (actual, not projected – Sankey diagrams are useful here) and customer care records.

Often time’s companies spend a small fortune on third-party consultants when they already have the information they need in-house or readily available. This provides a solid jumping-off point from which to interview customers and stakeholders. Depending on the size of the team, this work can be done as a group or broken into subgroups. It is preferential to get multiple perspectives on the same data as a diverse team will be able to draw out better insights and develop better questions.

When interviewing stakeholders and customers, don’t forget your customer care and business development teams. They know the customers and hear requests on a daily basis for bug fixes and features alike. In fact, in the case of customer care, they are more likely to understand the pain points of detractors, which are oftentimes harder to find for interviews. It is important to know both your weaknesses and strengths.

Finally, benchmark your competition. When benchmarking competition it is important to not just benchmark your direct competitors but best-of-breed and best-in-class competitors as well. FAANG companies (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google) have reset customer expectations in a big way, and being the best in a given horizontal might not be good enough to keep your customers long term. Consider looks at other companies in your vertical (best-of-breed) or the best digital experience in your customer’s lives (best-in-class).

It’s imperative to understand what customers experience outside of their life at work. There are several creative ways to benchmark, but something as simple as a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis is a helpful place to start.

Now, as a team, you have likely collected a lot of data. You can see, through quantitative and qualitative research, the opportunities to have discussions. First, gather and synthesize the data looking for patterns, but try and corroborate outliers as they could still be important. Develop objectives for in-field research – this could be what you want to observe – or formal discussion guides. Caution, though, as it is easy to become too structured. This will hurt your findings, and it is better to be a little unprepared than sounding scripted. Time in the field is rarely fully productive without some minimal amount of structure to guide it. This will prepare you for an infield session with the customer.

There are two primary ways to conduct field research. The first type of in-field research is called « Follow Me Home » which entails shadowing a customer in their environment – be it work, home, the store, etc. When conducting this research, it is important to note both goals and barriers so optimizations can be found. Intuit QuickBooks Point of Sale (POS) was founded on a similar approach. Their customers had a manual process of taking their POS data and keying it into their accounting software. The process was long and error-prone. Intuit’s solution of integrating POS solutions with QuickBooks saved the customer time. Similarly, my team at Anderson-Negele noticed dairy processes keeping FDA (Food and Drug Administration) records on paper and storing them for years. They developed a digital cloud-based solution appropriately named: The Paperless Recorder.

An alternative approach to the same type of methodology is the « journaling method », which is often used by major shoe companies. For example, when I would try new Brooks shoes, I was asked to record any problems or discomfort I had with the shoes daily. Similarly, when piloting any new product, asking customers to write down their sticking points regularly through surveys, journals or even just on paper will provide critical « real-time » feedback.

One word of caution: When creating these surveys for feedback, customers often have a different lens through which they view the product. It is important to balance specific questions with generic feedback. Additionally, most customers will miss a week, and some will drop out altogether – plan for this.

The second type of in-field research is the more traditional customer interviews. Ask customers what problems they have and what features they want. Customers might not be able to articulate their needs in a user story fashion. Still, a good product manager should always be able to tease out the social, emotional, and functional jobs to be done in order to create a hypothesis to build successful innovations. To get at user needs, it is important to get to the root cause in these interviews using the « Five Whys » technique. Customers tend to tell you what they want, not what problem they are trying to solve or why they are trying to solve it. It is crucial to be able to address their functional, social, emotional jobs to be done. One of my favorite post-interview debriefing methodologies is filling out the customer pains and gains chart as a team.

As a team, work through understanding what customers want to do (i.e., jobs to be done), and this, in turn, informs their pain points and gain points from your product. This process allows you and your team to formalize your understanding of your customer needs and sets you up to deliver remarkable products.