Three ways research can help your product process
💡 Key take-outs:
Research helps clarify the customer problem space, to help product teams design more effective solutions
Research providers should deliver insights in a way that product teams find easy to understand and use (e.g., in the form of personas and customer journey maps)
Research can valuably assist at every stage of the product development process, from early stage customer discovery though to the evaluation and refinement of value propositions and beyond!
Have you ever found yourself scratching your head, wondering why your products aren’t quite hitting the mark with customers? In this post, we discuss three ways that research can assist your product process and help you create products your customers love.
If you're not doing research, you're likely flying blind. You might have some assumptions based on personal experience, market trends, or intuition, but without research to guide you, you can run into real problems.
Why take the risk? Here are three ways that research can improve your product process.
Research clarifies the problem space
How well do you understand your customers’ problems? Getting clear on the right problem to address is fundamental to developing successful solutions.
The history of business is littered with stories of product teams investing energy and skill, not to mention scarce resources, to solve the wrong problem. Investing in research enables you to properly understand your customers challenges, so that you can build a solution that genuinely meets their needs.
Ultimately, you’re not solving a single problem but designing for a complex problem space. Here are a few ways that research can help clarify the customer problem space:
Problem space exploration
What’s going on in your customers’ lives that you could help them with? Research can help identify customer moments that matter, the challenges they face, how they are currently solving for these challenges, and how satisfied they are with their current solutions.
Segmentation and profiling
What are the major segments of customers you could design for? Research can help define your target audience and understand their mindsets, behaviours and motivations. These insights help sharpen your solution ideas and guide your product roadmap.
Research can help you generate solution ideas
Once you’ve identified your target audience and understood their lives and world, you need to work out how you and your product can help them.
Research reports full of data, charts and graphs are well and good, but they aren’t always useful to busy product teams. Product people need tangible tools they can use every day to design and refine winning solutions.
The right tools are important.
If your only tool is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.
Design researchers have developed a range of communications and storytelling tools for teams that are developing solution ideas. If your research provider isn’t translating their insights and results into appropriate tools for you to use, you need to request they do.
Here’s some examples of tools we use to communicate our findings at Phase One Insights:
Empathy maps
An empathy map is a single page description of how a customer segment thinks and feels about a problem. Empathy maps can be useful for enabling teams to brainstorm a wide range of possible solutions, before committing to one.
Personas
Personas are fictional characters who stand in for your target audience segments. At Phase One, we bring them to life with names and images (“Meet Gary!”). A well-constructed, evidence-based persona helps you put yourself in customers’ shoes and design solutions that help them achieve their goals. When faced with a decision, you can always ask: ‘What would Gary think?’
Customer journey maps
A customer journey map lays out the functional steps that your customers take to achieve a particular goal. A good customer journey map enables you to identify pain points and define opportunities to improve the customer experience.
Stakeholder maps
A stakeholder map identifies the key stakeholders who are impacted by your product, mapping out their problems and needs. This helps you to prioritize which problems to solve first.
And while we’re at it, let’s not forget that customers know their problems best. Why not involve members of your target audience directly in your design process?
Co-creation workshops
Co-creation workshops engage customers and stakeholders in the problem-solving process. Running a co-creation session is a good way of socializing research results and getting customer and stakeholder input on solutions.
Research can help you test and refine value propositions
The ultimate goal is to turn your solution idea into a clear and compelling value proposition. But the route from solution idea to value proposition is not always a straight line. It’s important to test and refine as you go.
Research can help you test and refine everything from early ideas through to fully worked up customer and business propositions.
Concept testing
Test ideas with your target audience to see whether they land and how they can be improved. Understand whether your ideas are successfully addressing customers’ jobs to be done. Prioritize now, next and later features.
Prototyping and user testing
User experience is a source of competitive advantage, so prototyping your ideas early is essential. Collect feedback to help you craft the proposition, refine the hero product features and finesse the user experience.
Construct optimization
Get down to the nitty gritty of pricing and product construct. When it really matters, construct optimization can help you to balance price and benefits, and inform your business case.
Say goodbye to guesswork
As these examples make clear, good research can play a role at every stage of the product development process. When used well, research takes the guesswork out of product development, and removes pain and anxiety from the many decisions that product teams have to make.
In sum, research helps you to identify the right customer problems to solve, and figure out how to solve them in the right way. That’s a good investment.
