Product owners need to be involved in customer research for a lot reasons. Reasons like:
- You're more likely to believe the results if you participated in the research.
- You're more likely to understand the relative importance of customer problems if you observed the problems happening.
- You will come up with more comprehensive solutions to problems when you understand the context in which they're happening.
- It's far too easy to ignore a report written up by a usability consultant, it's incredibly easy to forget to watch the testing videos.
- If you do it yourself, all of the lessons you've learned will stay within the company, long after a consultant has gone on to other projects.
When I talk about customer research or customer development or learning from customers, I really mean quite a lot of different techniques. Sure, there are general best practices around talking to customers, tips for improving your research skills, and important things you should avoid, but there are also things like picking the right testing method or tool that you almost certainly have no experience with. You need to know what is the most important thing for you to do right now.
Do you know when it would be helpful to do a card sort? A journal study? A contextual inquiry? Do you know when it's fine to do a remote usability study vs when you should really run one in person? How about when your product will benefit from using an online tool like usertesting.com or fivesecondtest, and when something like that isn't useful? Do you know what sort of testing to do in order to find out why specific metrics are lower than you'd like? Do you know when you should start your visual design and when you need to concentrate on usability? Do you know how many people to talk to in order to answer a specific question? Do you know at what points in the development cycle talking to users is critical and when it's a waste of time? Do you know how to take several hours of free form user conversations and turn it into a small number of features or bug fixes that can be communicated to your engineering team?
If you answered, "of course I know that" to all of those questions, then move along. You almost certainly have no use for somebody like me to come in and help you out. If you answered, "I'm going to learn the answer to all of those questions," then I wish you good luck on your journey of discovery. I'll warn you though. There are more questions just like those.
If, on the other hand, you said, "I don't know the answer to a lot of those questions, but I wish somebody could help me understand the small subset of them that matter to me, as a product owner, so that I could get on with the business of building a great product," then you might want to give me (or somebody like me) a call.
Because it's true that there is a huge amount to know about talking to your users. But it's also true that, at any given stage in your product development, you probably only need to be concerned with only a little bit of it. And, it's also true that figuring out which bit of it you need to know can be really hard to do without help. That's where people like me come in handy. We can help you figure out what to do next, and then we can help you learn how to do what you need to do next.
But be careful. If you're a lean startup, you probably don't want to pay us to actually do what you need to do next. For all the reasons I mentioned above, that's still your job.
Interested in this sort of service? Learn more about Users Know here.
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