You know your customer.
In fact, you either are really close to them or you are them.
You understand the market, the day-to-day and the most common problems.
This is what led you to create a product you love.
You created a landing page that communicates the value proposition in a way you understand it and resonates with every aspect of the challenge you aim to solve.
But once you publish it to the world, and you start getting mixed reactions…
- Some say they don’t understand what the product does.
- Some others say they don’t even relate to the problem you try to solve.
- Others struggle with the narrative or the way in which things are displayed and they lose interest before getting to the good part.
You notice you are spending 70 percent of your time convincing people what your product does: several rounds of 1 on 1 sales calls, creating tutorials, webinars and materials and many other things to turn someone into a qualified lead (dreaming they become a customer).
The offer feels weak, your team is acting on gut feeling and reacting to random results.
How could this happen? If you are the user, how is your strategy not working?
I’ve seen this exact pattern across big corporations and small startups. Knowing the problem is different from understanding the user.
If some version of these resonates with your journey, the problem isn’t the product… it’s the blind spot.
You need to stop the game of being the user.
You need to step up your user research game.
The fact you are familiar with a problem or an industry is usually the perfect trap to fall into when selling a product or service created to “scratch their own itch”.
Or maybe you did some user research years ago, but the market, the day to day, the context, the problems you try to solve and even your customer might have changed, and here you are… still trying to talk to them the same way you did before.
Or maybe you are new to a company. As companies grow, more cooks enter the kitchen, decisions drift toward business KPIs and user understanding becomes assumed rather than verified.
The irony is that, unless you deeply understand the user side of things, you might move product KPIs, but revenue, activation and retention won’t move at all.
So in order to improve the odds of nailing the right message, features, hierarchy or approach toward a product solution, here are 3 quick things you can start applying today:
- Interview EVERY stakeholder.This will feel scary even to think about. They’ll usually have conflicting points of view, goals, approaches on how to move forward, etc. It’ll get messy. That’s fine. This is one of the easiest and most powerful tools you might have, as surfacing conflicting points of view will give you a canvas to build new ideas and help different teams push in the same direction. Once you have a clear understanding of stakeholder expectations, you can act on it: suggest common paths toward their goals, create new initiatives so they can collaborate and even surface mutual benefits that can incentivize their collaboration.
- Do structured benchmark.Analyze 2 to 4 competitors and 2 tangential products that are not necessarily in your vertical but you admire. Screenshot every path, screen, flow and behavior. Compare the voice tone, visual impact and hierarchy.Ask yourself: What do they have that we don’t? How are they communicating that message? What are some advantages we have they don’t? How can we take advantage of those in a way that push us closer to our goals?
- Talk to your users.This might seem like an obvious thing, but it is shocking how many companies are still not doing it. This doesn’t have to be complicated.It can be as easy as booking 1 hour every Friday afternoon and send an open invitation to the whole company. You can get a list of customers and call the first one.Everyone can join passively and keep working on their things while listening. No pressure.The last 10 minutes of the hour, you can open the floor for coworkers to express ideas, insights or just comments. You can either do an unstructured session, or give everyone post-it notes and ask to write 3 opportunities they discover and 3 strengths they appreciate from the current offering after the session.
This simple act will start shifting the culture toward a user-centric company that is more aware that there are users on the other end of the product or service you are building.You can get great insight from a 10 minute open call with a user, where you can ask about their experience with your product. Oftentimes, the team collective brain start sparkling with ideas, that might even become tests to run and see the impact.
Of course your user research can get a lot more elaborated than that, but regardless of how you approach it, the ROI from this is tremendous.
You might have a strong roadmap and user insights, but the goal is to create a cycle in which the two work progressively. This way you lower the bias, become more intentional and objective on your choices and more targeted with your approach.
Now you know.
Take the challenge and point your roadmap in the right direction.
Mix user insights with business goals.
You’ll see the ROI so fast you won’t believe it’s true.
