The Snippet is a Weekly Newsletter on Product Management for aspiring product leaders.
“Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers”
- Seth Godin
When I first started in Product, I didn’t know much about the different techniques that User Experience researchers employed to understand customer needs, wants & behavior. For my own customer interviews, I was mostly winging them, using common sense and my notebook to record what our customers said. It’s a common problem that new Product Managers face.
Common sense is indispensable of course, but there are also some really powerful ways of understanding your customers, and more importantly, to bring that understanding to the broader team and organization.
And while Tools to understand your users and customers are aplenty, I believe there are a few tools that are pivotal and bare essentials that every Product Manager should learn about and strive to get better at.
These are tools that help you get to know your customers intimately, to understand what they want and need, how they think and buy — so you can use these learnings to build products that sell themselves.
Here are the Top 3 in my list:
#1. Interviewing Customers
Yes, Good Old Customer Interviews!
But if you’ve never interviewed people (let alone customers), you will learn that Interviewing people, especially as you are trying to figure out what to build is both an art and a science.
The Art is the harder part— You have to be an empathetic listener but a focused questioner. You have to be fully engaged, but also be able to detach yourself (in your head, not visibly) from a highly engaging conversation — to filter the signal from the noise.
You are in this quest for market truths— that will help you build a product your customers will love, market the product effectively, and sell it repeatably.
The Science of interviewing is relatively straightforward, however. It’s basically documenting everything that you learn, and repeating the interviews over multiple people to validate your learnings. It’s looking for truths that repeat and generalize, but not letting go of the idiosyncrasies. The latter helps you find niches of customer segments that are underserved.
There are several ways to document and visualize your learnings and then plan your next move based on them. Here are two of the most important ones.
#2. The User Experience Map
The User Experience Map or UX Map tells you everything that a person experiences as they go about achieving a goal or solving a problem. It is the big picture of what they are experiencing and how they are responding to these experiences. At this point, it has nothing to do with you
UX Maps are typically used when you are designing and building your product.
As an example, if you and your team want to build a pregnancy tracking app - understanding what a human-being experiences at different stages of their pregnancy will be pivotal to building your product.
An experience map helps you articulate the experiences that you and your team will need to take into account as you build your product.
This shared understanding then makes designing and building a product that much smoother.
#3. The Customer Journey Map
Now as you’re building your product you must also simultaneously start building your sales, marketing, and customer support strategy.
A Customer Journey map can help with that. Unlike a User Experience Map, a Customer Journey Map is much more specific.
A Customer Journey Map will tell you how a person looking for a solution to their problem goes about finding one.
It will trace the chronological sequence of actions that the person will take and their thoughts, emotions & frustrations in the process of doing so.
Imagine everything that a person wanting to buy a car has to experience — search for a car online, test drive several cars, choose a car, arrange financing, buying the car, Get it registered — before they can finally & legally drive the car. A car buyer’s experience map will include all of these touchpoints and the experiences that they have with a car brand.
Here’s the Starbucks Customer Journey Map for some inspiration
Mapping your customer’s Journey helps identify the specific touchpoints in your customer’s buying journey and helps you plan and align your marketing, distribution & customer service strategies around these touchpoints.
Without this Map you are basically flying blind, doesn't matter if you have the best product in the world.
A Customer Journey Map brings everything together
A Customer Journey Map brings your actual product and its user experience, as well as your brand and customer strategy together. Ultimately, the buyer’s journey should be stress-free and delightful — followed by a great experience that the product offers from the word go.
The goal of Customer Journey mapping is to ensure that each and every interaction and touchpoint is designed so as to convert a prospect into a customer that pays and stays with your product.
Build these maps together — not in silos
When building these maps, the only way to capture everything in a meaningful, well-rounded fashion is to build them in highly collaborative settings — Product, Marketing, UX, Sales all working together to build the map — debating and discussing what they know of the customer.
All discussions must be based on first-hand interviews and/or hard data that can be validated. Prior experience counts somewhat, but don’t let people’s opinions make it to the maps.
So whether you are an aspiring Product Manager or new to the game, you can hit the ground running by developing these key skills and improving them with each customer interaction. In any Product-led organization, the Product Manager represents the customer. You are your customer’s spokesperson in your organization. Use these tools to capture and showcase your customer’s narratives and help the rest of the organization connect with the customer.
Thanks for reading! If you want to connect, I am on twitter!
Want to dig deeper? Here are two excellent resources on this topic
About Journey Maps (Mind the Product)
About Interviewing Customers (Atlassian)
*Image Credits: You X Ventures & UX Indonesia
The Snippet is a Weekly Newsletter on Product Management for aspiring product leaders.