3.5 Finding Users 🤙
This section includes a reminder to have a mentor call 🤙
In this checkpoint, you'll begin to explore how to get in touch with your users and what you need to consider to do so effectively. Understanding who your users are, what they care about, and how to get them to share their perspective with you is going to be a huge part of your success as a PM.
One of your top priorities as a product manager is to understand the problems your users encounter when interacting with your product. A user problem is an opportunity for improvement, often measured in terms of KPIs and/or OKRs. So what's the best way to understand user problems? Talk directly to your users.
By the end of this checkpoint, you should be able to do the following:
- Describe the different types of users and stakeholders you should get feedback from
- List a number of methods to recruit users for feedback conversations
Why talk to users?
As a product manager, it's your job to understand the people who use your product. You should know their problems and figure out how you can create amazing solutions for them. At best, you understand your users so well that you can be their advocate even when they're not in the room. Being the voice of your customer is an integral part of being a product manager—and will be especially important when you are faced with tough decisions and pressure from stakeholders. At the end of the day, your ability to offer users value will determine the success of your product. If you really know your users' wants and needs, you'll make better decisions and be a more effective product manager.
There's no substitute for talking to your users. Sure, talking to salespeople or customer support staff is helpful for brainstorming or contextualizing what you know. But there are many advantages to talking to users yourself, and here are a few:
- You'll empathize with your users more when you hear directly from them.
- You'll avoid the miscommunication that can happen when you hear stories secondhand.
- You'll be able to tell more persuasive stories about your users and their problems.
- You can use them as a sounding board for confirming your understanding and ideas.
- Being the "voice of the customer" is something you're expected to do as a PM.
In other words, there are some things you can only learn by talking with your users. Staring at analytics data can only show you so much. When you need to understand the "why" of what's going on with your product, finding users to talk to is the best solution.
For instance, imagine you oversee a SaaS product. Each month, a subset of your users receive a survey in which they're asked the NPS question ("How likely would you be to recommend this product to a friend?"). Your product has enjoyed high NPS for the past year, but in the previous two months, there's been a substantial downward trend. While this quantitative trend will certainly sound an alarm bell, it won't tell you why the NPS metric has changed. To understand that, you're going to want to talk to users who are giving you low ratings.
Eric Migicovsky lays out beautifully on how to talk to users of your product. Though the talk is mainly aimed at founders, as a PM you have a lot to gain from watching this
Who are your users?
The answer to this question is, in one sense, quite obvious: your users are the people who use your product. But—as with many things—it's not that simple. There are a few other key people you need to think about. Check out a couple of examples below to demonstrate.
For most consumer products, the buyer and user are the same person. If you're the creator of Threes, a popular mobile game where you match numbers by sliding tiles, then your users are the people who buy and play your game. Similarly, for Apple, the purchaser and user of an iPhone is probably the same person.
Some products have multiple sets of users. For example, the Amazon marketplace mediates between buyers and merchants using Amazon as a shared platform. Amazon has two user audiences to consider whenever they make a change to their products—the merchants and the buyers. Other examples of products with several user audiences include ad publishing (with ad buyers and publishers as their users) and project management applications (with features for managers and features for individual contributors).
Though we cover the topic of User Personas later, you should know what it is at this checkpoint
Buyers, users, and influencers
You may recall from a previous checkpoint that some products have buyers and users who are not the same person. For example, when a Microsoft Windows operating system is installed on new HP laptops, HP is the buyer, but the laptop owner is the one who eventually uses Windows.
Most B2B products are in a similar situation. If you're selling marketing tools, the buyer of your product is probably going to be a VP of marketing or CMO. The day-to-day users, however, will be the people on the CMO's team. In this case, the buyer is the decision-maker, but not the user.
Some consumer products also have separate buyers and users. Consider a parent buying a phone for their teenage child or an educational app for a younger child's tablet. In this case, the parent is the buyer but not the user. The parent makes the final purchase decision on their child's behalf.
Sales teams would also note that you need to take influencers into account when selling products. For example, a CMO might be the decision-maker you must convince to buy your marketing product, but the company's CEO could be pushing the CMO to use a specific competing product because they know someone on that product's sales team that can give their company a discount. Or maybe the CFO of that company has a budget in mind that is lower than what you can sell your product for. In that case, the CEO or CFO is influencing the process and can have a huge impact on the final purchase decision.
Consumer products have influencers too. In the consumer product space, maybe you have a friend you always talk to when considering a new phone purchase. Maybe you are that friend, the person who everyone discuss smartphones with before they make a purchase. What would you do as a product manager to ensure such influencers recommend your product when the time comes?
As a product manager, you need to know about all your users and all the people involved in the decision to buy your product. That's the only way you can make informed decisions about prioritizing their needs. For example, when working on a B2B app, you might be faced with a choice between improving your product's demo and adding a feature for your enterprise customers. A better demo won't make daily users' lives better, but it could unlock more sales by convincing those CMOs to buy your product. To learn the most, go with your sales teams on their demos and meet those customers so you can learn about the problems for yourself.
Non-users
While it's critical to talk to users, another important group to talk to is non-users—that is, people who potentially would use your product but who, for one reason or another, currently do not. Maybe they are using competing products, maybe they are past users of your product who stopped using it, or maybe there is some other issue keeping them from choosing your product. These people are often called prospects.
For example, say you work at a B2C subscription service for high-quality streaming music. You're not seeing the kind of adoption and conversion that you planned on in your OKRs. You're worried it could stem from the price of your service compared to Spotify's, but you're not sure. What should you do to understand the gap? Find people who are not users of your product and talk to them to understand what's really stopping them from becoming subscribers.
Getting time from non-users can be difficult. They chose not to use your product, so they have no motivation to talk to you. This means that you'll need to find the right incentives and methods to get their time. But you'll get more out of it than any amount of effort you put in.
Finding users to learn from
You might be a full-time product manager, but your users are not full-time users of your product.
Users are busy people with their own lives and jobs, and they cannot be found in your office. While your coworkers can be good sources of information, they're usually nothing like the typical users of your product (and even if they were, their feedback would be skewed by their prior knowledge and relationships). Product managers should take to heart the famous acronym NIHITO—when it comes to talking to your users, Nothing Interesting Happens In The Office.
So the users you need to learn from are in their own homes and offices. They have better things to do than talk with you. Getting their time is hard, but there are a few things you could do to make it easier on yourself.
What's your goal?
Before you seek out people to talk with, you should spend some time planning how you'll use their time. Your goals could affect who you need to recruit. Here are a few examples of what your goals may be:
- You're considering one of three different strategies to increase sales, and you want to figure out which one is best
- You've noticed some strange user data from the sharing tools in your product, and you want to understand it better
- You've heard a lot of buzz about a new competing product that just launched, and you want to learn more about it
Each of these goals implies a slightly different audience to seek out:
- To increase sales, you need to talk with people who are directly involved in the purchasing process, like the decision-maker or the day-to-day users
- People who are actively using your product are the best ones to answer questions about specific features
- When trying to get competitive intelligence, you're better off talking to your existing customers or to prospective customers who are probably considering the competition's product
Once you identify your goal for these conversations, then it's time to start recruiting people for interviews.
Sales and support teams
Your sales and support teams are in close contact with your users. Ask people on these teams if they can give you the names of users to talk to. Support teams can tell you which customers are having the worst problems or which will have good feedback to provide. Your sales team can connect you to prospective customers or ones who are struggling to adopt your product (and are considering leaving for something else). If you're looking for specific kinds of customers, reach out to the sales and support teams for recommendations.
Conferences
No matter your industry, there's at least one convention where all your users flock to once a year. You should go to these conferences so you can learn more about your industry, meet your users firsthand, and look for opportunities to improve your product. You can also get a lot of competitive intelligence at conferences since your competitors are likely to be there too.
Craigslist and Taskrabbit
If you need just anyone to help, put out a call to Craigslist or Taskrabbit. You'll have to pay for people's time if you recruit through these services, but you can usually get interviews quickly (as compared to recruiting specific user types via an email request). Paying someone $20 for a quick interview session is worth it if you can book and complete it in the same day.
To go back to an earlier point, this is also a good way to find people who use competing products. For example, if you work at a B2C music streaming company but want to find Spotify users to interview, a callout in a task service may be your best bet. Just make it clear that you're not Spotify but that you do want to learn about how those people use it.
Many companies allocate a small budget to gaining access to users or potential users. Some will offer gift cards, marketing swag, or a chance to win a contest in order to set up interviews with people who are hard to reach but may have valuable insight.
Social media
You or your marketing team can also reach out to users over social media. Through Facebook posts, Twitter, Reddit, or other services, you can just name your needs and get respondents. You may need to do some additional screening to ensure they're really the right fit for your needs. That's easily done over a phone call or with a brief survey. You can also reach out on your own social networks, like LinkedIn, and ask others to help you find the right people. Finally, try online forums where your users are likely to congregate.
Recruiting services
Sometimes you need to talk with someone who has a specific title or set of responsibilities. For example, if you're making a product for tech professionals who develop software for virtual reality, you'll have a hard time finding them on your own. You can use a service like GLG for recruiting experts on specific topics or Respondent.io for automating recruitment. Some of these services will even do the research themselves and deliver a final report to you.
Recruit them yourself
As product manager, your product is a resource you could use to reach your users. You've probably seen pop-ups on a website asking you to fill out a survey. These typically have a very low conversion rate, but if you only need a couple of people to respond, then it's probably good enough. You could also email surveys to your users or ask them directly if they have a few minutes to chat with you.
What goes in the pitch
When you're ready to recruit people, you'll need a good offer to entice them to participate. Again, people are busy and don't want to lose half an hour just to talk with some random person. Here are a few items to keep in mind.
- Offer something of value. Don't just ask people for their time for free. Give them a gift in exchange, like company swag or a coffee shop gift certificate.
- Be clear about your needs. For example, if you need 30 minutes to talk to teenagers who deleted their Facebook account, say so. Being upfront and specific about your needs will help others decide whether or not they're the right people for you to talk to.
- Get a referral if you can. For example, if you have a mutual acquaintance with someone you need to talk to, you can have that shared friend make an introduction for you, or name-drop that friend when you get in touch with your user.
- Try a few times. You might get ignored the first time you ask. Try again after a few days. Don't give up after the first time.
Exponent has a great video on ways to collect product feedback.
What if you really can't talk to your users
Sometimes finding users can be very difficult. Maybe your users are an exclusive group, like Fortune 500 executives who can't spare a minute to talk with a random product manager. Perhaps your users are working parents who are just really busy. Or maybe your sales team is unwilling or incapable of helping you connect to your customers.
Here are a few tips about what you can do in this situation.
- Talk to your manager. Not being able to talk to your customers could jeopardize your work and your job. Make sure your manager knows about your issues and ask if they can help you find a path forward.
- Talk to the people who talk to your customers. It's not the same as talking to your customers directly, but people on your sales and support teams may have insights that can at least partly substitute.
- Find user correspondence. For example, check out your support teams' tickets to see what customers are saying or read reviews from your app and your competitors' app.
- Use your analytics. Data you collect about user behaviors can often point to flaws in your product or areas for improvement.
None of these is a perfect substitute, but making decisions with some information is better than making them with no information.
Practice ✍️
Review the list of products below. Imagine you are the PM responsible for improving these products. For each product, list all the user types you should talk to. Then, write down what specific methods you would use to recruit them for giving you feedback. These are the products:
- Instagram filters
- Salesforce
- YouTube pre-roll video ads (ads displayed before the video plays)
- PMcademy's Product Management Program
- ATM machine hardware
Did you cover all the potential users for each product? Can you brainstorm better ideas for recruiting users together? Some of the assignments in future modules and capstone projects will require you to go out and recruit users to do product research with, so start building those muscles now.
Mentor Call 1 🤙
Time for your first mentor call. Although you could get mentored from any free platform online, we recommend ADPList as it's free and boasts a huge community of product experts. You might have to signup to it's platform (which is again free) and schedule a mentor call from the ADPList platform itself.
Schedule a mentor call with an ADPList product mentor. ADPList provides free mentorships for everyone and is an amazing platform to learn and meet experts. Please ensure you take mentor calls with importance. Mentors play a crucial role in your career. Do not ask mentors to review assignments. They are only meant to guide you and give you tips on your growth. These are optional calls as well.
Let the mentors know beforehand what the call is about. Share you questions and let them know you are a bootcamp student. Again refrain from asking assignment related questions. They aren't meant to review your assignments.
Below are the list of mentors that we have collaborated with at PMcademy.
Looking for more mentors ?
You can choose to get mentored from any other mentor as well. Visit this link to find more product mentors from ADPList. However note that not everyone is aware of PMcademy, it that case let them know beforehand about PMcademy.com and about your meeting agenda.