How Product Managers Can Ace Customer Research : A Simple Guide

Product Managers represent the customers within their company. They should talk to enough customers so that they understand what customers want.

Here's a step-by-step guide to how they can do it effectively:

1. Customer Identification - Identify your customers from your target market.
   

2. Customer Segmentation - Group them based on shared characteristics or needs.

3. Start with Qualitative analysis - Have in-person conversations. These are open- ended, less structured, great for capturing nuance and for forming hypotheses. Eg. interviews. You can start to see patterns between your customers in about 7-10 interviews and can confirm those patterns between 10-15 interviews. However, the trade-offs for this method is that it is very difficult and expensive to talk to a lot of people.

4. Move to Quantitative analysis - This analysis is good for collecting data from a large group of people very quickly and at low cost. Eg. surveys. It is good at confirming your hypotheses at a large scale. However, the trade-offs for this method are it is structured and rigid i.e lack of flexibility leading to a lot of bad responses and garbage data. Also, it is not very good at generating hypotheses.

Before concluding my post, I wanted to share few tips for conducting customer interviews:

• Prepare a script in advance. This shows your customer that you are prepared.

• Begin with easy background questions. Egs. What is your name? How old are you? What does your company do? This brings your customers at ease and help them to open up.

• Transition to targeted questions about potential problems. You can use Day in the Life questions where you can ask customer to walk through an example from before and after the time period in question so you make sure your product fits into the broader context of their life really well.

• End with open ending questions like anything else they want to share.

By following these steps and tips, product managers can build rapport with customers and gather valuable insights to create products that truly meet their needs.