User Management During Discovery- Wish List
[This article was co-authored with Raphael Weiner, co founder at Orbital]
As mentioned in my previous blog- continuous user involvement in your product development lifecycle is essential to achieve adoption (read: success). But, finding (the right) users, getting their consent, scheduling recurring interviews etc. is anything but simple. Most of that process is manual, disorganized, hard to track, hard to improve, and not scalable.
What if?
Imagine you had a list of users who are, or might be interested in a feature you’re looking to work on:
- They expressed their interest explicitly, or
- They raised the issues with support/sales/success, or
- You’re working on an adjacent feature, or one that will improve their experience.
Let’s say there’s 50 of those users.
Now, you communicate to them your intent to work on that problem/feature, its value etc., and invite them to design and implement this feature with you through recurring (bi)weekly half hour sessions.
You need a communication mechanism to articulate your plan, confirm their interest, and a way to collect their consent.
You’re at 20-ish users.
Next, and the most important thing, you need a mechanism that automatically schedules sessions with them for the next X weeks. 15–30 minute interviews. If their schedule changes, it auto-adjusts both your calendars (a-la clockwise). The result- sustainable recurring meetings with your users until the success metric is achieved.
You’re now meeting regularly with 5–10 users, knowing that not everyone will be working with you all the way through.
The results of the interviews are entered into your product management tool (ProductBoard, Aha! and others) and summarized (using AI?) into the right themes, pain points and priority.
Users can be compensated for their participation in some format (eg. Tremendous makes this easy).
What about reporting? the right tool can provide some reporting to the product team and leadership, as well as relationship managers such as customer success and sales-
- Who are the users we talked to? What is their sentiment?
- How many users participated in validating this feature? what was their feedback? what issues remain and need follow up?
- Are we diversifying our research across users, or over-leveraging the same users? are we missing others?
- Are there product managers who could use more enablement around user interviews?
In summary, managing users during the discovery process is anything but trivial. Unfortunately, it’s often also overlooked, leading to insufficient user feedback in the process, and resulting in poor adoption and missed outcomes.
Some new vendors are looking to aid product managers in this process, such as Orbital (in early access). Hope to see more innovation in this space!
