Make sure it’s really just one question and that the answers are multiple choice and clear. This is not the time to start throwing in all the extra questions that marketing wants or adding “just one more as long as we’re surveying people.” You’re not really conducting a survey. You’re taking the temperature of your audience. You want to make this quick interaction as simple and painless as possible, because the question itself is not the end goal of this exercise.
STEP 3: Follow Up with Interviews
Now that you have the answer to your quick question, you need to follow up with qualitative interviews of as many of the people who answered “Extremely” as you can. Do whatever it is you need to do to get them on the phone or to meet them in person. The question was merely a screening device to find people who feel like your product provides a huge benefit to them. This is where you’ll really start learning.
Your goal in these interviews is to understand why your product is making their lives easier. Learn what they’re trying to do, and figure out what challenges they still face. These are your ideal, current user, and you need to truly understand the value you’re delivering to them in order to develop some ideas for how you could do better.
But don’t stop there. You also want to talk to some of the folks who are using your product but don’t feel it makes their lives easier. These are the people who answered “No” to your question, but for some reason continue to use your product.
As Cindy says, “A customer who uses your product daily but hates it is a customer who is open to switching to another solution.” These are likely folks who are forced by circumstances to use your product, but they’re not happy about it. It’s valuable to understand why your product isn’t making their lives easier. If you’re not providing them much value, you may consider killing or shifting focus away from the parts of your product that they use.
Most importantly, you need to understand the differences between the people who are happy, successful users of your product and those who are unhappy or not deriving much value from it. This is the difference between your ideal customer and somebody who is only with you until something better comes along.
What to Do When You Don’t Have the Right Customer
It’s unfortunate, but there are times when you realize that you don’t have the right customers. Sometimes, you simply acquired people who were originally interested in your product but aren’t excited enough about it to pay you or to stick around long term. They’re happy to occasionally use what you make for free, but they’re not about to give you any money or get their friends to join.
Other times, you can have a very excited group of early adopters, but you realize that the market they represent simply isn’t big enough to sustain the product. This happens a lot when you start with a group of “earlyvangelist” users who tend to be early adopters and have very specific needs that may not scale.
And, of course, sometimes external things happen, and the market itself changes—like streaming video luring people away from video rentals and cable TV. In this case, you might have had an enormous, captive market, but a better, more innovative solution comes along, and suddenly you’re fighting to find a new group of people who want what you make as your original users drift away to the competition.
In order to survive, companies in these situations need to seek out new markets, often by changing their products in ways that will alienate their current or remaining users. This is painful, both to the company and to the customers, especially when they’ve been together from the beginning.
Cindy has been through this twice, at Yodlee and Kissmetrics. In both cases, they had a loyal and enthusiastic user base that simply wasn’t large enough to support the business, and the companies had to make some tough decisions.
This can be one of the hardest decisions you’ll make as a product manager. It’s painful to stop supporting people who have been good customers. It feels awful to hear people complaining about being abandoned. And it’s never fun to voluntarily give up revenue from people who are happily paying you. But if there aren’t enough of them or if they’re not willing to pay you enough, sometimes this step is necessary, and you’re better off doing it quickly.
Why This Is So Important
In the long run, it’s equally important to identify and support your real customers and not try to satisfy people who aren’t the right customers. You want to spend your time and money where they’ll do the most good, and you can’t prioritize effectively if you’re trying to please everybody.
Finding the right customers means spending the time to really understand who your users are and why, and that means spending time studying the people who love your product and the people who don’t. Combine quantitative and qualitative data to get a better picture of who your best customers are and what value you’re providing to them, and don’t be afraid to go after a different customer if it’s absolutely necessary.
For more advice on getting to know your customers, read Cindy’s book, Lean Customer Development: Building Products Your Customers Will Buy, and check out her blog at cindyalvarez.com, which has fantastic posts on customer development, building a culture of research, and product management.
CHAPTER 3
Do Better Research
Exercise: Picking a Research Topic
Exercise: Picking a Research Methodology
The Most Important Methodologies
The Dangers of Picking Research Methodologies
Once you have an idea of who your user is, you’re going to need to get to know them better. This is harder than it sounds. A huge mistake that I see non-researchers make when they start doing user research is that they just go out and start talking to people.
They’ll accost people at a coffee shop and ask whether they like a particular product. Or they’ll do a usability test to figure out if somebody will buy. Or they’ll send out a survey to decide what feature to build next. Or they’ll do a focus group.
These sorts of “studies” are all worse than useless. They are actively harmful to your product development process. Not only do they not give you the kind of information that you’re looking for, but they also can give you incorrect information. It’s not that these particular research methodologies can’t be useful. They’re incredibly useful when used for the right thing (well, except for focus groups). The problem is that they’re so often used incorrectly.
Take talking to people in coffee shops. Getting 20 people to smile politely at you while you pitch them your idea does not constitute validation of your market. People are generally polite, and most of them will nod encouragingly and agree that your product is going to be fantastic in exchange for a $5 Frappuccino. Even if they didn’t lie just to get you to go away, they’d still be incapable of telling you whether or not they would use your product, largely because the chances that you found someone at random who meets your target persona is extremely