The Most Impactful Action You Can Take To Improve Your Product Is: Talking To Customers
Hands down, the most impactful action you can take to improve your product and its marketing is talking to existing or potential customers and watching them use your product.
Ideally, pretend to be an independent researcher not linked to the product. This should help them share their thoughts with more directness.
During the session:
0. Go wide & build rapport
a Ask them to tell you more about their work/life (depending on your product)
b. Name challenges they are facing regarding that topic
c. What tools/process they use to deal with these challenges
d. What they like about these tools
e. What they think is a gap in these tools
f. How much do they pay for these tools and how they think of that price
g. Ask what a better tool should be like to be an attractive alternative (function, price)
1. Ask potential users or customers to go through your landing page(s) and explain back to you:
a. What your product does
b. Who the product is made for
c. Which products they see as similar
d. What concerns or questions they have about the product
e. What actions they would take to find answers to those concerns, and watch them try to find them
f. What they expect the price of the product to be (hide the price in some sessions)
g. What they would do to try your product, and watch how they navigate
2. Ask them to use your product:
a. Ask them to identify a task they expect to accomplish with your product
b. Ask why, where, when, how often, with whom, and how they usually do this task
c. Ask them to try to complete the task using your product
d. Ask them to compare the experience to the tool or process they currently use
e. Ask them to compare the strengths and weaknesses of your product versus their current solution
f. Ask them what they would change to make your product more valuable and easier to use for them
No matter what is your experience and background, you will always come out surprised, and have tons of insights that can impact your product.
Tips:
1. Keep the session recorded including their screen activities (with their permission)
2. Talk way way less. Listen more
3. Be comfortable with silence (they will say more)
4. If they ask you how something works, kindly say, as a researcher I’m not allowed to help during sessions. I can help after the session.
5. Before closing, ask them what questions you should have asked but didn’t. And what other thoughts/ideas/feedback they would like to share before closing (there is always something)
If you need help running research for your product, or training/coaching your team, feel free to DM on LinkedIn