Customer Discovery and Research
Last updated
Last updated
Customer discovery and research involves understanding your target customers' needs, behaviors, and pain points. This process is crucial for identifying opportunities for product improvement, validating product ideas, and ensuring that your product meets market demands. Techniques used in customer discovery and research may include surveys, interviews, user testing, and data analysis.
Let's continue with the Product Manager at the dating app company, like Tinder. After defining the problem of low user engagement, the Product Manager decides to conduct customer discovery and research to better understand the users' needs and behaviors.
The Product Manager starts by analyzing user data from the app. They find that users under the age of 25 are the most active, making up 60% of the user base, and that 65% of all users are male. They also notice that users tend to be more active during the evening hours and that user activity spikes around holidays and weekends.
To gather more qualitative data, the Product Manager decides to conduct user interviews. They select a diverse group of users, including both highly active users and those who are less active. During the interviews, the Product Manager asks questions about the users' experiences with the app, their likes and dislikes, and any challenges they face while using the app.
From the interviews, the Product Manager learns that many users find the app's matching algorithm to be lacking. Users report that they often get matched with people who don't share their interests or who live too far away. They also find that the chat feature is not user-friendly, making it difficult to keep a conversation going.
Armed with this information, the Product Manager now has a better understanding of the users' needs and pain points. They can use this knowledge to inform the design and validation of potential solutions.
Customer discovery and research can be time-consuming and requires careful planning to ensure that the right questions are asked and the right data is collected. Interpreting the data and translating it into actionable insights can also be challenging.
Consider a product or service you use regularly. How would you conduct customer discovery and research for this product? What questions would you ask? What data would you collect?
User interviews [ | ]
Survey design [ | ]
Data analysis in product management [ | ]
User personas [ | ]
Customer journey mapping. [ | ]