Introduction

Product research doesn’t have to be difficult. It doesn’t have to take a long time and cost a lot of money. It doesn’t have to be done by scientists or expert, experienced researchers. It can be quick, cheap, simple, and performed by the whole team. You just have to remember a few rules and develop a research mindset.

We started this journey with a question. Why, in an industry that has been building digital products for decades, do teams still make products that fail? Article after article came up with credible answers: myopic vision, lack of market fit, no differentiation, poor focus, inability to ”cross the chasm,” too many negative reviews, etc. But at the root of all these is one problem: failing to understand the needs of the customer.

When teams want to understand their customers, they turn to market and user research. Market research is collecting and analyzing information about a market that is categorized by the products or services sold within it. It encompasses the characteristics, spending habits, locations, and needs of a business’s target market and the industry as a whole. User research identifies the users’ goals, needs, and motivations using human-centric methods.

While both market research and user research create great insights, what many teams fail to do is build on these insights in a timely manner. By treating research as a special, untouchable project that only a handful of people conduct on an infrequent basis, they miss out on implementing their results. The outcome is frustration, poor understanding of the market, and a product that isn’t designed for its user.

Also, numbers matter, though it’s not all numbers.¹ Sometimes the qualitative can get overlooked because there aren’t concrete “hard numbers” in qualitative research. Many executives don’t know how to deal with qualitative research. Instead they rely on what makes the most sense to them: the numbers. It’s important to realize that in product research, numbers do matter, just as much as the stories, anecdotes, and observations that lead to insights. Product research connects the dots between the quantitative product analytics, marketing data, and qualitative user research (as shown in Figure 0-1).

Figure I-1. Product research

If you don’t have good data, your conclusions and insights can lead you astray. We’ll show you how to look at all three types of input in order to connect the dots for smart insights that can lead you to build great products.

Let’s examine some of the reasons companies give for not conducting product research properly. They’re common excuses, and you might have used some of them yourself. We certainly have!

It takes too long

There are many methods of product research. Some of them, such as multi-country ethnographic studies, will take a long time. But there are many other methods that can be carried out in weeks, days, even hours. You don’t have to spend months to find valuable insights. This book will show you how to begin discovering what you need to know quickly.

We don’t have the budget

The majority of your research needs can be addressed with budget-friendly methods, iteratively, without compromising quality. Ask yourself this: Do you have the budget to redesign your product? If the answer is no, avoiding product research might be the most expensive mistake you ever make.

We’re not researchers

No one is born a researcher. Once upon a time, we weren’t researchers either. Research, like any other discipline, is a learnable skill. You just have to have the right question, the right users, and the right mindset. We hope the methods in this book will help you learn to conduct valuable product research.

The product is completely new

Your team is excited about their new, from-scratch project. How can they do user research when nothing like this exists? There are always ways to gather feedback from your potential users. In fact, you’re taking a big risk if your new product meets its users for the first time at the time of production. Getting early feedback and making changes will create a much better product.

It’s just a small change

If you’re only making a small change to your product, do you need to conduct research? Many small changes accumulate over time to create big changes, and while it’s great that your organization can ship small changes, you’re still serving a new experience to your users. Small changes can and should be validated through user research.

We need the features first

Agile development, lean methods, and DevOps allow us to create working software more easily than ever before. In this era of speed and time-to-market, it feels very natural to deliver first and think later. However, that system you’ve shipped so quickly may affect your users just as quickly as you release your features. Product research allows you to find out which features work and which you should hold back.

It’s not the right time

It’s always the right time. Research falls into three categories: generative, descriptive, and evaluative. (We will go into detail about these in Chapter 3) One of these approaches can be used at each point in the product cycle. Based on the question you’re trying to answer, there are many ways to employ product research methods without changing your schedule.

We don’t have many users to test with

You don’t need many users. This may go against what you’ve heard, especially if you have experience with quantitative methods. “What about statistical significance?” we hear you cry. Qualitative research is considered valid when it can intentionally capture the essence of what is being observed, even if it doesn’t have statistical significance. There are many methods where you only need five to ten users to discover how your ideas resonate with your audience.

We have enough data

Data is the starting point of all user research (see chapter 2). However, while Google Analytics, Omniture, Mixpanel, Appsee, and similar telemetry systems are great for understanding what users are doing, they don’t tell you why users are behaving as they are. It’s only when you combine actual user behavior from a telemetry system with qualitative user research that you’ll get solid insights.

We’ll learn during the pilot

Pilots and betas are good opportunities to get user feedback. However, the cost of making changes at the point of launch is high, and you risk upsetting the willing early adopters you’ve fought to find. Product research across the product development lifecycle will give you the same feedback as a pilot, at a much lower cost and at a time when you can still fix your product.

Those who don’t conduct research learn the hard way, like Bill Nguyen did with his app Color: ““I thought we were going to build a better Facebook. But within 30 minutes I realized, Oh my God, it’s broken.”²

If you think product research is a waste of time and resources, you’re probably doing it wrong. But there is a different way. Product research draws on the strengths of both market and user research, and focuses on understanding how your product works for the customers it serves. It uses product analytics to inform research questions and relies on behavioral evidence to understand the user. Product research acknowledges the existence of a market and always considers market dynamics when interpreting results and suggesting actions.

Product research isn’t just about doing. It’s a change in mindset—a new way of thinking that takes our own preconceptions into account. We all have blind spots, egos, and agendas that get in the way of forming valid and solid insights directly from our users. Product research methods tackle these head on.

Product research skills can be learned. With the right training and mindset, everyone can do it;when planned well, it costs very little. Instead of taking months to yield results, product research takes only a few days, meaning it’s easy to build into existing practices. And when product research is easy, it can become a habit, creating better products and happier, more engaged teams to build them.

This book is the result of decades of experience in the world of product research. During that time we’ve found a handful of rules that make product research effective and enjoyable. Like all rules, they’re meant to be broken. In fact, we’ve broken every one of them—sometimes unwittingly, sometimes purposefully. But understanding a framework for product research will allow you to create products that sell—and then you can find the exceptions to the rules.

Let’s get started.