FUNDAMENTALS OF PRODUCT MANAGEMENT: THE PROCESSES

Generating product ideas is about rigorous customer understanding

While product teams can generate and hypothesize product ideas in silos, most of those ideas rarely succeed. Successful product ideas require consistent and detailed interaction with customers and analysis of their behavior. Customer interviews, empathizing by living their lives, and rigorous behavior analysis are required for effective idea generation.

During product discovery, product teams need to employ methods that generate ideas that are the most likely to help solve their business problems and minimize risks, and when the team interacts directly and frequently with real users and customers, then finding sufficient quantity and quality of ideas should not be a problem.

Product discovery planning using ‘Story Mapping’ and ‘Customer Discovery’

Again, generating the best ideas is all about using techniques that allow the product team to better understand their users and customers. Some of those techniques include:

• Customer interviews
• Living in the customers’ shoes
• Studying customer behavior

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

Customer interviews

While this is the most basic technique to find product ideas, many product teams are far from connecting with customers and rarely understand their users’ need through direct feedback.

However, undoubtedly, conducting effective interviews is one of the most powerful skills for product managers and the main source of breakthrough ideas.

While many interview methodologies can be used (informal, formal, contextual inquiry, etc.), the main goal of them all is to uncover new insights and things that the team previously did not know such as:

• Are they indeed your target customers?
• Do they truly have the hypothetical problem you are thinking of?
• What current solutions are they using?
• What would make them switch to your product?

To continuously discover customer insights, product teams need to:

• Establish a consistent cadence of touchpoints with customers and aim for 2–3 hours of interviews per week
• Carry no bias in purpose. The goal is not to convince the customers of your product, but to let them speak and for the product team to learn quickly and iterate development
• Make sure the recruits are the intended and true target customers
• If needed, meet the users/customers in their natural and habitual environment to understand their pains and problems truly
• It’s best to have the product manager, designer, and a lead engineer in the interviews, with one driving the interview, one taking notes, and the other observing
• Prepare as a team before interviews, and aim to minimize the injection of biases and leading questions or answers into interviews
• Ask open-ended questions and try to learn as much as possible
• If needed, have your product and ideas with you and let the customers test them for usability and value creation
• Conduct debriefing sessions immediately after the interview to align your insights as a team

Photo by Oziel Gómez on Unsplash

Empathizing: by wearing the customers’ shoes

This will require you to go out to the customers and ask them to walk you through how they work so that you can learn to do their job through a new, better, and more productive solution.

A customer can be defined as:

• An end-consumer for B2C products
• A business for B2B products
• A developer for API products
• An internal employee/colleague for enabling products

The technique is the same for all of the above — the product team needs the customers to teach them how they do their job and to walk them through their pain and how they live their lives. And it’s important to have product managers, designers, and engineers participate in the process to maximize shared learning.

This method for ideation is a high-empathy human-centered discovery process used by top design-thinking organizations such as IDEO.

Defining ‘Design Thinking’ — in theory and action

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Study customer behavior…and pivot as needed

While either method of assessing the marketplace and finding lucrative opportunities with significant pain (i.e., following the market) or delivering pain-relieving solutions using technology (i.e., following the technology) can provide potentially rewarding products, an alternative is to allow, encourage, and support customers to use products for means other than initially intended and to capture those opportunities. This will require a significant amount of analysis and detail-orientedness from product managers to understand how customers are behaving and to pivot accordingly.

Customer Development: a product manager’s top priority

There are many stories of such great products that were initially launched for other purposes such as:

• Groupon: was initially a social tipping point fundraising platform for charity and donations, but then pivoted to group-based discounting services
• Flickr: started as an online role-playing game that had a photo-sharing tool. As it scaled, the feature became the most popular asset and became Flickr
• Instagram: launched as an online check-in app with a photo feature, then as they studies what the users most preferred, pivoted to the current platform it is
• Youtube and Facebook: initially launched dating platforms but realized the potential for video streaming and social networking through studying user behaviors (or misbehavior)
• Yelp: launched as a recommendation asking engine from friends, but through careful study of users’ behaviors, pivoted to a review writing platform for local business

Famous business pivot examples that you should know of

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Running hackathons

While the previous methods were all focused on the customers (i.e., demand side), at times, it makes sense to focus on generating ideas for the solution (i.e., supply side). The most prevalent way used by technology companies is through hackathons. Hackathons can be either directed or undirected:

• Directed: a specific customer problem is presented and people/teams self-organize to solve the problem. The best example of this is Netflix’s recommendation engine algorithms. The goal is for teams to create prototypes that can be evaluated, and if appropriate, tested on actual users.
• Undirected: under this category, teams explore whatever ideas they like, as long as it’s loosely connected to the mission of the company

Of course, depending on needs, the nature of hackathons can vary from a spectrum of fully directed to fully undirected ones. There are two major benefits to hackathons:

• Teams of engineers, designers, and product managers work to create meaningful and holistically working products
• It’s an amazing opportunity for organizations to recruit missionary and self-motivated teams

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