Perfectly Awesome

Discovery is challenging; it can be hard to know what to research, how to do discovery as a team, and how to get buy-in. Follow these 7 tips for smoother discovery efforts.

This is a series where we delve into the world of product management. This week we discuss the art of understanding your users.

Lessons learned from a year of startup life.

And how can you figure it out what they really need

How Data Scientists can learn from how a Product Manager prioritizes features and requirements to build a successful product.

General Partner Connie Chan on how leading brands are using AI and other technology to combine the serendipitous discovery of offline shopping with the infinite options of online shopping. Today, most of the Western world revolves around search-based online commerce. This means that most shoppers type directly what they want into a store search bar,...

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step  Lǎozi 老子 I just had lunch with Shenwei, one of my ex-students who had just taken a job in a mid-sized consulting firm.  After a bit of catch…

What is an Opportunity Solution Tree? Learn more about opportunity solution trees and the 4 steps involved in creating them.

The product management and startup worlds are buzzing about the importance of "validation". In this entry, I'll explain how this idea orig...

Criticizing Voice of the Customer (VOC) programs is like speaking out against motherhood and apple pie. The last time I criticized VOC programs, someone left a comment chastising me for presuming that a bank could know what its customers wanted without asking them.

Hubstaff founder Dave Nevogt shares how to test your startup idea by analyzing model, market and concept.

Conversations with customers are valuable, but they have to be the right type of conversations – not merely questions about forgotten passwords and the like. They have to add value, for you, and them.

Hits are more valuable than ever, mostly because they're more rare than ever. The Zipf Distribution, also described in Chris Anderson's Long Tail, helps us understand just how valuable hi…

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.

It's OK to ask a B2B prospect if they would use your product during customer discovery. Just don't to stop at "Yes" and assume validation or a likely sale.

Teams that build continuous customer discovery into their DNA will become smarter than their investors, and build more successful companies. — Awhile back I blogged about Ashwin, one of my ex…

An online Game of Thrones quiz got a million online hits for HBO.

Pricing is one of the most challenging decisions for any startup. One of the simplest ways of discovering customer willingness to pay is simply to ask them. At first blush, that might seem a reasonable and effective solution, it is prone to wild inaccuracy. Absolute pricing judgments are hard without reference points. For example: How much would you be willing to pay for a new iPhone? It’s a very challenging question to answer in the abstract.

Apple has carefully guarded the podcast directory, persuading podcasters that ‘winning’ here is the shortcut to building a popular podcast. But they’re terrible at introducing pod…

Preface: the assumption for this essay is that you're building a B2B app, and you have something built but you're having trouble getting people to pay for it There are three problems with getting your first few customers: You (probably) don't know how to sell things You don't know who you're selling to You don't even really know what you're selling Nobody tells you how to answers these questions, and so most people go out

Michael Sippey has been building tech products for over 20 years. His most valuable ideas, though? They came from speaking with customers. Here's how.

‘The Problem with…’ series covers controversial topics related to efforts to improve healthcare quality, including widely recommended but deceptively difficult strategies for improvement and pervasive problems that seem to resist solution. The ‘5 whys’ technique is one of the most widely taught approaches to root-cause analysis (RCA) in healthcare. Its use is promoted by the WHO,1 the English National Health Service,2 the Institute for Healthcare Improvement,3 the Joint Commission4 and many other organisations in the field of healthcare quality and safety. Like most such tools, though, its popularity is not the result of any evidence that it is effective.5–8 Instead, it probably owes its place in the curriculum and practice of RCA to a combination of pedigree, simplicity and pedagogy. In terms of pedigree, ‘5 whys’ traces its roots back to the Toyota Production System (TPS).9 It also plays a key role in Lean10 (a generic version of TPS) as well as Six Sigma,11 another popular quality improvement (QI) methodology. Taiichi Ohno describes ‘5 whys’ as central to the TPS methodology:The basis of Toyota's scientific approach is to ask why five times whenever we find a problem … By repeating why five times, the nature of the problem as well as its solution becomes clear. The solution, or the how-to, is designated as ‘1H.’ Thus, ‘Five whys equal one how’ (5W=1H). (ref. 9, p. 123) This quote also makes the case for the technique's simplicity. Asking ‘why’ five times allows users to arrive at a single root cause that might not have been obvious at the outset. It may also inspire a single solution to address that root cause (though it is not clear that the ‘1H’ side of the equation has been adopted as widely). The pedagogical argument for …

I’ve been working on a marketing automation tool (more on that at the end of the post). Or rather, I’ve been working on an idea for a marketing automation tool as I don’t want a single line of code written before I’d experienced a notable pull from target customers. (This may sound like I am clever/…

A conversation with Bruce La Fetra on customer interviews. We compare notes on how to organize findings and take best advantage of the insights gleaned.

Your #1 resource for digital marketing tips, trends, and strategy to help you build a successful online business.

Great insight moves your career, organization, or business forward. The problem? Most people are terrible at asking questions. Learn from the pros how to do it right.

Forrester is a leading global market research company that helps organizations exceed customer demands and excel with technology. Learn how Forrester can help.

There has been a lot of discussion in the design world recently about "change aversion." Most of the articles about it seem to be targeting the new Google redesign, but I've certainly seen this same discussion happen at many companies when big changes aren't universally embraced by users.

If you are building a product, you should always speak with customers and test your idea before. But you probably don’t know that *you *might be making some of the most common mistakes when running your experiments. Mistakes include testing the wrong aspect of your business, asking the wrong questions and neglecting to define a criterion for success. In this article, Grace Ng will show you a guide to designing quick, effective, low-cost experiments.

Common mistakes to avoid when you’re getting started with experimentation

From the high-level perspective of what makes for a great design leader, to the tactical suggestions around the slide that needs to be in your portfolio presentation, Twilio & Segment's Hareem Mannan shares useful advice for every stage of a designer's career.

Almost exactly a year ago, I started a little boutique software company called Report Card Writer. As the name suggests, my flagship software product does pretty much one thing: it helps teachers write report card comments faster. Its core technical functionality is part survey form, part template-filler-inner, with a few extra bolt-on features that make it easy to create and populate the form and template, respectively.

Every week, I talk with CEOs who tell me they want to speed up innovation. In fact, they want to schedule it. Recently a product leader shared with me an OKR to ship one major innovation each quarter, measured as “users will give each innovative feature a top rating.” This

How to ask better questions.

It’s so important to test your new product idea long before you feel ready.

Unlock valuable insights for effective discovery by decoding product metrics. Learn how to leverage these metrics to make informed decisions and optimize your product development process.

After more than 45 years as an off-pricer, the retailer hit the skids when COVID-19 forced its doors shut and zeroed out revenue. Now it hopes to slim down in Chapter 11.

We should invest at least as much time in understanding our customers as we do in optimizing our product development process.

Confirming what people already believe can sometimes help organizations overcome barriers to change.

Dear designers/marketers (and innocent person reading this note), So, you’re doing customer interviews and user research, good for you! You’ve joined the fold of responsible, empathetic, and effective product design and marketing professionals. But you sound like a robot when you email me. Here are some questions from user testing emails & surveys I’ve received […]