What is the Problem? – Customer discovery lessons and techniques for building identity products for business

What Is The Problem? Customer Discover Lessons & Techniques

Tuesday 4I

Convener: Margo Johnson, Head of Product @ Transmute

Notes-taker(s): Karyl Fowler, CEO @ Transmute

Tags for the session - technology discussed/ideas considered:

product development, human-centered

Discussion notes, key understandings, outstanding questions, observations, and, if appropriate to this discussion: action items, next steps:

• As a product person, your job is to figure out what customers want by talking less and listening more.
• Goal of session: walk through parts of the human-centered design process (speaker’s company uses this for developing identity product):
  • 1 – Empathize
  • 2 - Define
  • 3 - Ideate
  • 4 - Prototype
  • 5 – Test
• Product Cycle: Research > Design > Build > Launch > Repeat x #? infinite loops among these steps too (e.g. testing concepts, etc.)
• Some product development models can be done in a data-heavy format that is ultimately exploitive:
  • Which translates to: If we can we build it, should we?
• First exercise:
  • Pair off for “empathy” exercise; each partner gets 2 minutes to describe a thing they experienced related to our digital identities that invoked an emotion (positive or negative or neutral)
  • Then group shared what their partners said in the conversation to demonstrate how a product professional might convey/bring customer information back to their teams.
• Why should we care/empathize? Because its real humans, people just like us that will be using and engaging with our products. Therefore, we must understand their actual problems, perspectives and feelings in order to build the best/right products for them.
• Explored task + behavior customer observation exercises used for customer discovery
• Sample sizes depends on your resource constraints and industry or context: academics or the medical sector have stringent guidelines whereas human centered design frameworks [and others that many tech start-ups rely on] push you to do only as much discovery as required to then test a new/different/next assumption.
• Based on audience experience, augmenting your customers’ thought process (e.g. offering considerations and active listening) instead of prescribing a path is one way to demonstrate empathy and learn more from them. Designing together vs coming in with a hammer.
• Implementing a customer research plan to discover or measure how aware or educated users are about [identity data and sharing] can help determine the best prototype to introduce for effective user testing and further education.
  • Sometimes the dummy prototypes encourage more candid feedback that saves tons of $ in future development; friendly folks may not want to poke holes in something they perceive you already invested a ton in building.
  • Furthermore, testing an entirely new product, concept or feature warrants different discovery methods and different testing methods than, say, testing whether a slightly improved feature will impact conversion rate.
• The group’s favorite prototyping tools include: Invision, sketch, Figma, Axure, userlytics, ppt, paper drawings, google analytics etc. (The original palm pilot prototype was literally a cardboard cutout).
• Understanding your teams’ diverse skill sets, what they bring to the table and how they fit into this process is important. Use your own team for discovery by talking to trainers & those in your own org who are constantly in touch with customers; they already know a lot of what you, as a product person, are trying to discover.
  • Sales IS part of product discovery.