Where does your user learn about products like this? — 65: 1187-1187
What sorts of messages do they respond to? — 65: 1190-1191
Who are their influencers or approvers for selecting and buying products like this? — 65: 1194-1194
What need are they trying to meet? — 65: 1201-1201
What do they currently do to meet this need? — 65: 1204-1205
How much time do they spend meeting this need? — 66: 1208-1208
Are they currently looking for a solution to meet this need? — 66: 1214-1215
Do they have special requirements or needs for adopting the product? — 66: 1218-1218
What behaviors/needs/goals predict usage? — 66: 1226-1226
How does this product meet the need? — 67: 1230-1231
How does this product make the user better? — 67: 1234-1234
With whom will they use the product? Virtually/in-person/combo? — 67: 1242-1242
Where will they use the product? — 67: 1245-1246
When and how often will they use the product? — 67: 1249-1249
Why will they keep using it over the course of the next few years? — 68: 1256-1256
How will their usage change over the next few months? The next few years? — 68: 1260-1260
What will be different about the user in the next few months? The next few years? — 68: 1264-1265
Now that you have the answer to your quick question, you need to follow up with qualitative interviews of as many of the people who answered “Extremely” as you can. Do whatever it is you need to do to get them on the phone or to meet them in person. The question was merely a screening device to find people who feel like your product provides a huge benefit to them. This is where you’ll really start learning. Your goal in these interviews is to understand why your product is making their lives easier. Learn what they’re trying to do, and figure out what challenges they still face. These are your ideal, current user, and you need to truly understand the value you’re delivering to them in order to develop some ideas for how you could do better. But don’t stop there. You also want to talk to some of the folks who are using your product but don’t feel it makes their lives easier. These are the people who answered “No” to your question, but for some reason continue to use your product. — 74: 1377-1385
For more advice on getting to know your customers, read Cindy’s book, Lean Customer Development: Building Products Your Customers Will Buy, and check out her blog at cindyalvarez.com, which has fantastic posts on customer development, building a culture of research, and product management. — 77: 1419-1422
can change course. Now that you understand the difference, go through your topics and put a G or V on each sticky note, depending on whether the topic is meant to generate ideas or validate them, as shown in Figure — 88: 1630-1632
Now that you understand the difference, go through your topics and put a G or V on each sticky note, depending on whether the topic is meant to generate ideas or validate them, as shown in Figure 3.5. — 88: 1630-1632
You need to know whether you want to learn what is happening or learn why it is happening. This is important, because it’s the number one factor in deciding what sort of research you’re going to be doing. — 88: 1639-1640
So, return to your sticky notes and put a What or a Why on the appropriate research topics, as shown in Figure 3.6. — 90: 1667-1668
If you’ve decided you need to learn about your users, you will need a qualitative, open-ended type of research. Some of my favorites are: • Contextual inquiry • Observational research • Customer development interviews — 94: 1770-1774
if you have a landing page with a new tagline and image, you would take that landing page and show it to someone for five seconds, and then take it away (see Figure 3.8). You would then ask the following questions: • What does that product do? • Who is that product for? • What would you do next? — 97: 1813-1818
• Tell me about your morning routine. • How often do you travel to visit family? But don’t always use these. Pick questions that will give you helpful information about who the person is and whether they’re likely to use your product. These questions should be factual, easy for the participant to answer, and not personal enough to make them uncomfortable. — 109: 2031-2035
While people are terrible at telling the future, they’re reasonably good at telling you stories about their past and present. — 111: 2078-2079
There are dozens of lovely journey map styles available online, and you can feel free to use one of those. There’s an especially nice one created by Chris Risdon when he was at Adaptive Path. — 147: 2736-2737
A good design principle is: • Descriptive enough that people understand it immediately • Pithy and shareable • Actionable — 152: 2827-2830
When you’re creating principles for your product, you need to limit yourself. Chris suggests you choose somewhere between five and eight, — 155: 2865-2866
Your goal is not to ship features. It’s to create value. — 160: 2968-2968
Discovery • Onboarding • Habit Building • Mastery — 243: 4544-4547
To write a job story, fill in the blanks: When trigger I want to goal + activity so I can outcome — 245: 4575-4580
Once you’ve built that core, habit-building loop, then you start to focus on the supporting systems. But you still can’t do everything all at once. Prioritization is key. Amy Jo offered the Game Thinking Roadmap that shows where you should be focused at different points of your product development cycle (see Figure 8.13). FIGURE 8.13 The Game Thinking Roadmap from the marvelous Amy Jo Kim. You can see from the line that you start at habit building, move to working on onboarding, then discovery, and finally mastery. Amy Jo said, “You work backward from that core nugget of everyday value.” Once you know what your core loop is, you refine your onboarding, and then you figure out how to create messaging for discovery that conveys the value to your ideal customer. Finally, you’re going to make sure that the product stays compelling for retained users, but not until you’ve been around for long enough to have some retained users. — 247: 4620-4630
One of the most difficult things about testing assumptions is understanding which sorts of things you’re taking for granted. After seeing dozens of teams of all sizes make all sorts of mistaken assumptions, I’ve noticed that they tend to fall into three categories: problem, solution, and implementation. — 252: 4708-4710
An assumption stack accumulates when companies build products or features built on layers of assumptions, none of which has been validated. In January of 2016, a social ecommerce company called Getwear closed down. They published an article in Smashing Magazine later in the year detailing some of the assumptions they’d made early on that had turned out not to be true. (http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/11/lessons-learned-shutting-startup/) — 269: 5009-5013
If you’re not measuring the outcomes of your experiments, you’ll never know whether you’re getting better or worse. If you’re not talking to users, you’ll never know why you’re getting better or worse. — 276: 5147-5148
I’ve been in two-hour meetings where people shouted variations of “This will be completely useless!” and “This will save our company!” over and over and over. Neither was correct, but by the time the feature shipped, everybody had forgotten which side of the argument they’d been on. The hypothesis tracker is a great way of defusing that argument by simply recording the positions of the various people and getting on with your day. — 300: 5626-5629
The important thing to remember here is that you get to decide what’s important to you. Once you’ve decided that, you have to devise experiments that will help you understand whether or not you’re making progress toward your goals. Nobody’s telling you what those goals should be. — 303: 5673-5675
products—it’s called the empty room problem. — 333: 6199-6199
Whenever you do have to report data, try answering these questions in this order: • What question were you asking that you felt these data would answer? • What did the data tell you? • Why do you believe the data looks the way it does? • What decisions or changes are you making based on this data? • How will you know if you’re right? By doing this, you’re providing not just a report, but also an understanding of the metrics and a plan for using them. The best part about it is, if you can’t answer these questions, you probably shouldn’t be bothering with reporting on the data. — 335: 6242-6251
“Data is less of a problem than we think it is,” Avinash said. “We have more data than God wants anybody to have. The problem is the way people think.” It may seem odd that a digital marketing evangelist is saying that we have more data than we need, but it makes sense. We don’t need more data. We need to use the data we have more wisely by picking the right metrics for the right audience. That’s where Avinash’s See, Think, Do, Care business framework comes into play. It replaces the traditional market segments with clusters of audiences based on their intent, commercial or otherwise. — 339: 6311-6316
To frame intent, Avinash divides customer behavior into four clusters: See, Think, Do, and Care: • See: These are people who have no current intent to purchase a product like yours, but they could still be in your market. They’re probably interested in the space your product inhabits. • Think: These are people who are thinking about products in your category, but they’re not actively considering buying right now. • Do: These are people who are actively in purchase mode or have just purchased your product. • Care: These are your current most valuable, loyal users. Let’s look at an example. Imagine that you own a gym, and you’re wondering whom to reach in order to make more revenue. Here are your intent clusters: • See: These are folks who are likely to care about their health and well being. • Think: These are the people who have noticed that they’re putting on a little weight and are thinking about ways to take it off. • Do: People in this cluster are actively looking for a gym and may have even come in to check out your facilities or have used a guest pass to try out some classes. • Care: These people already belong to your gym, come regularly, and tell their friends all about their personal trainers. — 340: 6323-6338
Each cluster has its own metrics that you want to measure in order to judge whether your efforts to reach people are working: • See Metrics: Conversation rate (how much people are talking about you), amplification rate, applause rate, and subscribers. Watch social media to see who’s talking about your product and whether people are sharing the content you’re putting out. • Think Metrics: Click-through rate, page depth, and percent assisted. These are metrics for your marketing website or blog or newsletter—however you’re delivering content—that show how deeply people are engaging with the information you’re delivering them and whether that outreach is eventually leading to a purchase. • Do Metrics: Visitor loyalty, checkout/abandonment rate, conversion, and profit. Again, the Do cluster is all about purchasing, so the metrics you care about will be those dealing with whether visitors make it all the way through the purchase process. • Care Metrics: Repeat purchases, likelihood to recommend, and lifetime value. For this cluster, you care about keeping users around for the long haul and getting them excited enough to turn them into brand advocates so that their value to you increases over time. — 342: 6372-6384
you don’t want a product team. You want a heist team (see Figure 12.5 — 352: 6544-6545
The one important thing that PMs need to do, though, is provide a clear vision. “When there isn’t a clear vision, that’s a problem,” Irene explained. “When PMs are doing wireframes and tactics but not explaining the big picture, that’s a big problem.” It’s not that PMs shouldn’t do wireframes and operate tactically. It’s that vision and leadership are a huge part of their role that often won’t get done if they’re not doing it. — 356: 6611-6615