How to Get The Best Insights for Building Great Products
Getting closer to your customers is the only surefire way to gain the unique insights needed to build the best products.
The closer you are to the people you serve and their problems, the better your product or solution will be.
When you reduce the gap between you and your customers, several things happen.
You notice things your competitors don’t, like inflection points.
You iterate faster.
Your product solves a real problem–a pain point for many people.
You get unique insights not found anywhere else.
There are many ways to get closer to your customers, some more effective than others.
There's a hierarchy that ranges from simply surveying your customers, which provides superficial insights, to actually being the customer, which offers deeper insights, with various gradations in between.
Let’s explore this hierarchy, starting at the top with being the customer.
Be the customer
There’s no substitute for being a customer of your product. After all, what’s better than first-hand knowledge and experience with the problem you're solving? The best entrepreneurs build products that solve the challenges they face themselves.
Richard Branson famously launched Virgin Atlantic after his flight was delayed. Seeing an opportunity, he chartered a plane to his destination and recruited the other stranded passengers.
Yvon Chouinard needed higher-quality climbing pitons and attire. Since no company met his specific requirements, including leaving minimal impact on the environment, he founded Patagonia.
Derek Sivers started CD Baby when, as a musician, he couldn’t get his music online due to being too small for large music publishers. Sivers learned to program and developed a site where he and his friends could publish their music without gatekeepers.
Tobias Lütke, Daniel Weinand, and Scott Lake needed a better way to sell their snowboards online. After finding existing eCommerce solutions lacking, they created Shopify.
I could go on listing example after example of great products built by people scratching their own itch. When you make a product to solve your own problem, you tend to fall in love with the problem and come up with novel solutions that outsiders could never dream of.
If you don’t use the product you sell, however, consider whether you’re the right person to build it. Without first-hand experience, you’ll lack a deeper understanding of your customer’s needs, turning the product development process into a hypothetical exercise, rather than a real one.
Build with customer
Building out in the open, and with customers, is a popular trend in corporate America right now, and for good reason. When you build products openly, your customers have a chance to provide critical feedback to improve your product. To paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis, sunlight is the best disinfectant.
When I worked at Twitter, we’d tweet out prototypes to get reactions from users. This feedback not only informed the product but also how to position and sell it.
Even when you’re a hardcore customer of your product, early customer feedback on prototypes can reveal blindspots. And while being a customer of your product is essential, building openly with customers can take a product from good to great.
Talk to customers
On the topic of talking to customers, the founder of Sam Adams Lager, Jim Koch said:
“...I only wish they’d [marketers] get out and try to sell some of the products they’ve been hyping. See, to the customer–and I’m talking about the person sitting at the bar choosing a beer–markets don’t exist. Market niches don’t exist… to me, the only reality is the beer and the people drinking the beer.”
People who build and use their products and are the customers of their products will outperform those who do not. Missionaries beat mercenaries every time.
Assuming you’re not your target customer, the next best thing you can do is talk to your customers often and in 1:1 settings rather than focus groups. Since people don’t buy in groups, putting them in groups will lead to false positive or negative signals and social bias.
The more time you spend having open conversations with your customer the more likely you are to uncover their true needs and wants, which can sometimes be things your product may or may not do well.
Aside: For inspiration on talking to customers, read Talking to Humans by Giff Constable. It’s the best 89 pages on the subject.
Observe the customers
In addition to talking to your customers, observing them can lead to breakthrough insight. Procter & Gamble repositioned Febreze after watching people clean their homes.
While Febreze was created to be used as part of the cleaning process, what they noticed time and time again was that people were using it after they cleaned. Almost as a way to conclude a cleaning, consumers would “spritz” the room and be done. This led to an entirely new way to position the product and billions of dollars in new revenue.
For online products, on the other hand, you don’t even need to go into people’s homes. You can see how customers are buying your products with tools like Fullstory and Quantum Metrics.
Observing customers also leads to a better understanding of how customers are currently solving your problem with hacked together solutions.
“One of the best indicators that the market needs a new or better solution is that some people are not accepting their frustration with a particular problem, but they are actively trying to solve it. Maybe they tried a few different solutions. Maybe they tried hacking together their own solution. These stories are great indicators of market need.”
Giff Constable, Talking to Humans
Survey customers
If all else fails, you can always survey your customers. Just be cautious. Insights from surveys can be noisy and hard to make sense of. Unless you allow for write-in feedback, the insights you gather are often more descriptive than actionable.
Ultimately, the best way to build a great product is to be the customer and build with other people like you. Necessity is the mother of invention, and those who have an acute problem are more likely to find a solution than those who don’t.
Talking to and observing customers are excellent additional ways to get insight but on their own are not sufficient. And the absolute minimum you can do is ask your customers how you can better serve them through surveys.
To build the best products, take customer-centricity to the extreme: Be the customer. Build with customers. Talk to customers. Observe customers. Survey customers. Do all of these things repeatedly, and you will not be disappointed.