The Art of Customer Insight
As a musician, I look at a finished product like a finished song. Product management is like composing a song — getting the kernel of the melody in your mind, painstakingly crafting individual melodic phrases, layering rhythms and accompaniments to create harmony, methodically recording one track at a time, and meticulously mixing and mastering the tracks. The art of product management is very much like the art of composing good music. The grandeur of the final composition magically gets created when all the individual pieces come together naturally. In that magical grandeur of the final composition, the individual pieces of the song acquire a whole new dimension they never had before. To create magic with the final song, musicians know how important it is to get these individual pieces right. One off-note can mar the entire song. Likewise, to build a successful product, product managers should know it’s important to get the small things right. To be a successful product manager, it’s important to get the small things right over and over again.
I’m starting a blog that I hope can demystify the art of product management and can inspire aspiring product managers. I want to share stories to illustrate and humanize various aspects of product management.
My first topic on the art of product management is customer insight.
Insight, the seed of a product
Just like every big journey starts with that important first step, so does every product. The first step to a product is almost always customer insight.
So, what exactly is insight?
Merriam-Webster defines insight as “the power or act of seeing into a situation.” It is the power to see something that’s not evident to the average mind.
There are associated traits that beautifully come together to enable an insight -
Discrimination stresses the power to distinguish and select what is appropriate — e.g., the discrimination that you develop through listening to a lot of customers to separate their needs from their wants — i.e., the wheat from the chaff.
Discernment shows stronger accuracy in distinguishing — e.g., the discernment to know a pattern in customer needs
Perception implies quick and often empathetic discernment — e.g., a keen perception of customer motives behind their needs
Penetration implies a searching mind that goes beyond what is obvious or superficial — e.g., the penetration to arrive at a customer insight
Customer insight is the power of seeing and understanding a customer differently, leading one to take a different perspective on a customer’s status quo. It usually includes discernment and empathy, deploying skills of both the mind and the heart. It hones in on an inherent dilemma or tension or dissatisfaction in a customer with an existing experience, which only an empathetic mind can penetrate.
So, what if there’s no dissatisfaction?
Talking about honing in on inherent dissatisfaction, you might wonder “What if customers are not in any kind of dissatisfied state in the first place?” The following two quotes from Jeff Bezos are perfect answers to that question and are a reminder that it’s always safe for us to assume that customers are discontent with something -
“Customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf. No customer ever asked Amazon to create the Prime membership program, but it sure turns out they wanted it” — Jeff Bezos
“One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static — they go up. It’s human nature.” — Jeff Bezos
Insight examples
The seeds for great products are sown when we find these tensions that underpin customer experiences and identify the customer motivations behind them. Here are a few examples of insights and how they became the genesis of delightful products -
#1 — Friction in shopping
One of the most ingenious and successful paid membership programs in e-commerce began with an insight that tapped into customers’ dilemma about having to think about shipping fees every time they wanted to buy something. This dilemma introduced psychological friction that limited their online purchases. Amazon Prime eliminated that friction by making shipping fees a non-issue. Customers didn’t have to think about shipping fees anymore.
#2 — Frustration with buying music and listening on the move
Apple iPod capitalized on customers’ frustration with the record store buying experience and not being able to have their entire music collection in their pocket. iPod eliminated both frustrations, leading to a reimagined music buying and listening experience.
#3 — Tension with difficult phone hardware
Apple iPhone capitalized on customers’ tension with prevailing small screen sizes and inflexible hardware interfaces. Its touchscreen-based design removed these tensions and reimagined what a smartphone can be.
#4 — Friction in rental reservations
Airbnb uncovered friction in customers’ vacation rental reservations because of a lack of visual experience and then created a frictionless reservation experience by moving from a text-heavy search to a photo-heavy browsing.
#5 — Low confidence in funding deals
Capital One Financial Services discovered a big pain that car dealers experienced in a typical auto financing process. The deal submission process is a very time-consuming and complex process that requires tribal knowledge, follow-ups, and re-submissions of paper documents. On top of that, dealers generally lacked predictability of the outcome of their submitted deals and lacked confidence that any deal would actually fund. Aaron Brady, senior product executive at Capital One, picked up this strong emotion of helplessness and then introduced several changes that made it easy for dealers to gain high confidence in funding for their deals. With no confusion, no surprises, and no returns, the new process left dealers feeling smart and on top of their game. This led to a much-improved car buying and financing experience for consumers and their wanting to share the excitement with others.
#6 — Dissatisfaction with 360-degree peer feedback
Brett Hellman, the founder of a new startup called Matter, discovered a general dissatisfaction among young hungry professionals relating to the professional feedback they receive at work. They felt the feedback was infrequent, in a framework that over-indexes on skills their current employer values (vs. being aligned with their own long-term plans), and presented in an anonymous manner that dilutes both the feedback and its actionability. Brett believes that with Matter, professionals will actively be in control of feedback they receive from their professional circle and be able to act on it.
Train yourself for insights
You can follow these 3 simple steps to have a penetrating mind that’s capable of arriving at customer insights -
Step 1 — Perceive — first, understand the current customer experience
To understand your customers, go directly to the customer. Talk to them.
Go to the source behind the metrics -
I find a lot of product managers relying on numbers as the ultimate representation of customer experiences. While metrics are important in adding depth to our understanding of customers’ perception (e.g., “35% of customers said this feature will be useful”), adoption (e.g., “12% of customers use this new service”), and usage (e.g., “there are 0.6M daily active users for the new online game”) of products, they do not automatically facilitate customer insights. For example, these metrics do not tell us why 35% of the customers say they find a feature useful. They do not tell us what the motivation is for 12% of customers to use the new service or if there’s unknown friction that prevents higher usage of the new online game.
“Market research and customer surveys can become proxies for customers — something that’s especially dangerous when you’re inventing and designing products… I’m not against beta testing or surveys. But you, the product or service owner, must understand the customer, have a vision, and love the offering. Then, beta testing and research can help you find your blind spots. A remarkable customer experience starts with heart, intuition, curiosity, play, guts, taste. You won’t find any of it in a survey.” — Jeff Bezos
Go beyond the literal -
A verbatim ask from a customer is very useful to tell a story and it carries a lot of weight to stakeholders but unfortunately, it does not necessarily lead to insight. Interpreting their statements verbatim may lead you down the wrong path — e.g., building features they may not need or delivering incremental features that limit your true potential to deliver products they love. They may ask for a faster horse but we could do better innovating a motor vehicle. Many other times, a true understanding of customers may not come from what they explicitly ask, especially if they do not know what they need — e.g., no one asked for Prime to be created but customers used it in droves when the program was started.
Observe to discern -
Intuit’s Follow Me Home is a customer immersion practice where employees observe customers in their natural environment. Such a practice helps product owners to uncover how customers actually use their products — e.g., how smooth their first-use experience is, where they get interrupted, where they resume an action, how they switch devices, how many steps they actually take, and when they stop using your product. Mere observation does not guarantee insight, find out more. For example, when you observe that the customer switches from the mobile to the laptop in the middle of the workflow, discern that they find that the viewing experience in the mobile application does not give them enough confidence to make their purchasing decision readily.
Step 2 — Empathize — Next, get to the core emotions — e.g., dilemma, tension, friction, dissatisfaction — that underpin the customer’s experience
Recognize emotions -
In this critical step, you recognize how your customer feels and understand their emotional state with strong accuracy. You’re able to connect with the core emotions felt by your customer, e.g., dissatisfaction, dilemma, lack of confidence, and fear. So, you’re able to understand the dilemma the consumer faces in knowing they have to pay shipping fees. You can relate to their inability to complete a transaction in that state of mind. You’re also able to deeply feel the lack of confidence in that car dealer every time they submit a funding application.
Practice cognitive empathy -
Good product managers need to practice cognitive empathy. Unlike emotional empathy, which unconsciously results in the observer sharing the emotions of the observed, cognitive empathy is about the observer recognizing and understanding the emotions of the observed. The former is a resulting state while the latter is a conscious choice. Emotional empathy is something some of us are born with while cognitive empathy can be acquired by anyone. Product managers need to deliberately train themselves to acquire and grow this skill.
Step 3 — Penetrate — finally, understand why it all matters to the customer
Dive deep to understand the customer’s motivation -
Understanding the strong emotions that underpin a customer’s experience will naturally lead you to their motivations. For example, once you uncover a professional’s dissatisfaction with the quality of professional feedback they’re receiving, you learn that they’re driven by the need to improve themselves by hearing from those whose opinions that truly matter to them. Likewise, a consumer’s strong dilemma about shipping fees leads you to their emotional motive to eliminate their guilt and discomfort about paying for convenience.
This sequence of a) understanding your customer’s current experience, b) recognizing their strong emotions about something lacking in their current experience, and c) understanding their true motivations will almost always lead you to valuable insights. Remember insight is not a ready-made idea for your next product or product feature but it serves as a solid foundation for your next product innovation. You can train yourself to be good at it!
Chandar
