With constant pressure to fail fast and ship fast, digital product people oftentimes oversee a fundamental rule to any solution-driven output. They fail to dive deeper into their “raison d’etre” ; the problems they set up to solve for the people who encounter them.
Principle I: Become infatuated with a problem
As digital product people, we are entrusted with translating our understanding of a problem and its ecosystem (industry, location, environment, people, etc.) into a workable solution by using features and pieces of functionality that address the problem, and then deciding when and how to make those available to people who need them.
Without an intimate understanding of a problem and its ecosystem, to the point of making it our own, and lacking empathy towards the people encountering it (i.e. users), our solutions are bound to fail, no matter how beautiful or technologically superior we make them. For example, many tech pundits attribute the failure of Amazon’s Fire Phone to product teams falling in love with their own problems and creating solutions like “scan any item then buy it from Amazon” that do not address a concrete problem or need, and are of little-or-no-value to users.
A good analogy would be that of a doctor; No good doctor is willing to provide a diagnoses, medication, or remedy without a prior systematic and intimate understanding of the patient and the illness. A misdiagnosis would not only mistreat the underlying illness, but it could very well backfire.
Over the course of a decade in the product space, the deep understanding of problems and a user-empathy philosophy has been a rallying cry for my teams and I, and has helped us ideate and launch dozens of successful user-centric solutions for startups and Fortune 100 companies alike.
From my own experience in interviewing, hiring, training, and managing product-people, that philosophy is the differentiator between an average product-person and a stellar-product person. Instilling that philosophy and attitude cannot be easily taught, whereas other skills and processes can be.
According to various product publications and studies (from the likes of HBR, ProductSchool, ProductTalk and others) one the key characteristics to look for in a product person is empathy.
Below are some of the techniques that I continue to leverage to enable myself (and others) to truly become infatuated with a problem:
Communication
- Talk to your users, and as often as you can. More specifically, actively listen and let them do the talking, whether in the form of informal chats, formal interviews, focus groups, or one-on-one sessions. Always schedule follow-up conversations, share learnings, solicit additional input, and ask for advice. Have them react to your “solutions” (ideally in the form of prototypes), attend your demos, and weigh-in on your roadmaps. Prepare questions that help focus the conversation on problems, and keepreminding your users to resist “solutioning” on-the-fly.
- As you interpret the responses, don’t be afraid to admit that you may have misunderstood a problem. Sometimes, the best course of action is going back to the drawing board; that’s what a good doctor would do.
Data Enrichment
- Surveys: Carefully craft your surveys, avoiding loaded questions and incomplete / incoherent response options. The most important tip is to keep your own bias in-check when interpreting the results.
- Analytics: If you are not building a product from scratch, analyze behavioral data collected through like Google Analytics or Azure Insights, in parallel to your continuous conversations.
- User Personas: A fictional character and state description created to represent a user type and have a common team understanding and agreement on key user characteristics, and problems /needs faced. A standard practice within many human-centered design principles, personas “help you step out of yourself(…) to identify with the user you’re designing for.”, as defined by the Interaction Design Foundation.
Immersion: Make it your own
- My personal philosophy and the most powerful form of true heartware development. Although challenging to achieve, nothing beats getting first-hand experience with a problem and becoming the user. That unique perspective enables you to act, feel, think, and ultimately make the best decisions for your users.
Many successful tech startups, like WhatsApp, arose from founders who faced and became infatuated with a specific problem. Jan Koum, one of the WhatsApp co-founders, revealed that the idea for Whatsapp came about so “he could stop missing out on calls on his new smartphone”.