Data — Product manager’s best friend
Data is a product manager’s best friend. However, just like friends in real life, you need to know when to phone a friend and who to call upon.
In search of a problem – going broad
Finding the right problem to solve with a product is often the hardest problem in itself. This is when you are in the “unknown unknown” zone because you don’t live the customer’s life day in and day out. If you are lucky, you may have thousands of customers that you can survey to tell you what they want you to solve. Even then, it is still not sufficient because customers often do not articulate a problem that translates well into a feature. For instance, if the problem is discovery of a feature, you cannot rely on customers to point this out! Further, the loudest few may steer you towards a niche problem even before solving for bigger pain points.
When you are in search of a problem, there is no substitute to spending valuable time with your target customers. You may not get to meet hundreds of customers that will get a statistician excited, but even a handful of such customer conversations will help you identify a list of problems that no data would uncover. This is qualitative data at best, but more valuable than quantitative data you may have from other sources.
In search of a problem – going narrow
After spending some quality time with customers, you probably have identified more problems than you bargained for. Not all problems are born equal, so you have to narrow down to a critical few.
Surveys help here because they can give you sufficient volume of responses to get a statistically significant signal. Send out a survey with feature descriptions, and ask customers to rank them. At the end of this exercise, you should have a narrow data-backed set of problems to focus.
In search of a solution
Having narrowed down uncomfortably to a problem, you must have brainstormed several solutions that vary in your estimate of effectiveness and effort. However, you want to measure effectiveness of the solution based on customer input. Here again both qualitative and quantitative methods can help. Build quick prototypes for the different solutions and test them in face to face conversations with customers, surveys or even live tests (either A/B tests with real solutions or “fake-o” prototypes). A combination of qualitative and quantitative data will lead you to what works and what does not, so you can refine your solution taking the best bits of the different options you tested.
A friend in need
A successful product manager is paranoid. Paranoid that you are not solving the right problem. Paranoid that you may be chasing the wrong solution. Paranoid that the solution you are about to push to production will create resentment or even public outcry. The recent Skype upgrade comes to mind. Make data, both qualitative and quantitative, your friend and add it to your survival kit. After all, what are friends for?
