After Research: Creating Useful & Well-Executed Research Outcomes – February 2022 Wrap

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Following a number of sessions on gathering customer feedback, we were fortunate to be joined by seasoned researcher Jess Nichols to share some insights on the next stage of research – bringing it all together and synthesising your qualitative data, creating reusable and actionable insights and advocating your research across your team. 

Setting up for Success – Do Not Do Research in a Bubble

Research is there to mitigate business risks. 

Therefore, one of the worst outcomes is for your research to be ignored, shelved, or not utilised. 

Alleviating this risk begins before you even start conducting your research. Give some thought to what successful research looks like. Are you trying to drive to specific research outcomes? What is the wider business context? Are there strategies or OKRs that can act as your guardrails? Work with your team to ensure you are solving the right knowledge gaps for them. Having this North star can help to provide clarity in what questions you need to answer with your research.

Synthesising your Data

Once you have collected all your feedback and conducted your interviews, it’s time to collate your research and find the patterns in the data. This is crucial for connecting your data to any desired outcomes. 

Participants will commonly try to contextualise questions with their understanding of the problem or situation. They may apply their own biases to their responses. So you should not take their responses at face value. Understanding, and classifying the data into behaviours (what people do) and attitudinal (what people think) can be beneficial. Try to drill into the responses to find the underlying pain points. 

"What people sat, what people do & what they say they do are entirely different things" - Margaret Mead

You can then form insights from the patterns of behaviours or attitudes.

Some tips for when you analyse your data:

  • There is no single right way to analyse your data. So just start, and pivot along the way.
  • Use your OKRs to guide you.
  • Be comfortable with conflict.

Sharing your Insights

One of the aims of research is to have no surprises at the end. Share as you go. This can help to identify what resonates, what may be controversial and need more care, or what can derail conversations and should be avoided. 

Research also won’t be useful if your teams don’t understand it. Creating stories can be a useful vehicle to deliver insights. Your team is more likely to remember stories that they can connect with, which can make it easier for them to incorporate the customer insights into their work. 

  • Tie the insights back your original research questions;
  • Advocate for your customers’ needs (especially those which may not have been considered by your team in the past);
  • Help your team understand how to action what you’ve learnt about your customers. 
Insights are the sticky stories you want to tell about your customers.

There will always be biases, from both your participants (friendliness, social desirability, habituation) and your own (confirmation bias, cultural bias, halo effect, etc). The main thing is to recognise them and to then try to minimise them. 

Ensure your Research makes an Impact

As well as being the biggest advocate for your research, find and partner with others to help champion and influence behaviours.

A handy way to approach this is by:

  • People: to amplify your learnings. You can start with designers, marketing and product marketers, other product managers and your research community.
  • Processes: to add traceability to your findings. Insert relevant insights into the product development process, through user stories, requirements documents or annotations in designs.
  • Platforms: to store your research for future use. Upload your presentation to your internal wikis. Bring up relevant insights during meetings. Share bite-sized insights over chat.

Your research will not always have a clear or direct impact on a business outcome. Sometimes the result will be more subtle, and change the direction or the way we understand our customers over a longer period of time. Either way, celebrate the impact you make, big or small. 

Successful research involves a level of humility. Not just listening to your research participants, but listening to your internal stakeholders so you can be effective with them using it.

Thanks

Thank you to Jess Nichols for sharing, to our volunteers Nosh and Steve and our event sponsors Pluralsight / A Cloud Guru.

Further Reading and Resources

You can find Jess on LinkedIn, Twitter or her website http://www.jessnichols.com.

Some resources mentioned during the session include:

Never Rescue your Team from the Villain – September 2021 Wrap

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As Product Managers, we constantly find ourselves knee-deep dealing with strategic decisions, prioritisation and leading without authority – all of which can create anxiety and conflict in our day. But how should we approach this drama, and are there ways to flip the switch? In September, Kate Edwards-Davis introduced us to the Karpman Drama Triangle to help illustrate the dynamics of this drama.

The Karpman Drama Triangle

The Karpman Drama Triangle, developed by Stephen B Karpman, is a social model that describes the human interactions between three opposing roles:

  • Victim;
  • Persecutor (Villain); and
  • Rescuer (Hero)

Karpman represents these roles within an inverted triangle, to demonstrate the natural hierarchy, with the persecutor and rescuer being in positions of power or authority above the victim.

The Victim can commonly feel powerless, helpless or oppressed. They may hold a sense of pity for themselves, and feel incapable of negotiating or meeting the demands of the persecutor. Surprisingly, the victim usually initiates the drama, when they seek out a rescuer to save them, which in reality can reinforce the Victim’s negative mindset.

The Rescuer (or Hero) can be perceived to have an authority or mastery, which we don’t recognise in the victim, and will step in to save the victim from the persecutor. The victim encourages this belief, as it is easier to be rescued rather than being accountable. 

The Persecutor (or Villain) may be critical of the victim. They blame the victim for failing, or perhaps even for the anticipation of failure. They might feel superior to the victim, and that the victim’s actions (or rather inactions) are holding them back. Often, a person may assume the persecutor role due to being a victim in another triangle.

In reality, everybody oscillates between all three roles in different situations. The repetition and switching of roles reinforces the cycle, and can cause the participants’ actions and reactions to fall into dysfunctional patterns.

Who is the winner in this circle (triangle) of drama?

Nobody wins.

Everybody feels justified in their position.

  • The Persecutor avoids accountability, as it is always somebody else’s fault. Some common traits include not knowing how to use authority with compassion, or how to ask for something difficult. They struggle to challenge others without threats or aggression.
  • The Rescuer receives gratification from having somebody depend on them. However, their actions prevent the victim’s own self-empowerment. 
  • The Victim finds it easier to not take responsibility for their own feelings when challenged in a difficult situation. They seek safety and protection from others, and feel valued by having others take pity on them.

Beating the Triangle

We need to learn to recognise the triangles around us, so that we can avoid them if we can. 

If avoidance is not possible, or it’s too late and we’re already in a triangle, then we should reflect on our own role first, and how our interactions may be contributing and prolonging the triangle. Resist the temptation of judging others and their intentions. We need to shift our own mindset first.

There are some alternative triangles to counter the drama triangle.

The Empowerment Dynamic

  • The Challenger (instead of Persecutor) makes the requests and gives constructive feedback to drive the team forward.
  • The Coach (instead of Rescuer) empowers the victim to help themselves.
  • The Creator (instead of Victim) accepts and pursues the challenge.

The Compassion Triangle (OR Winners Triangle)

  • The Persecutor needs to use assertion rather than aggression.
  • The Rescuer needs to care for the victim, encourage and acknowledge their capabilities, rather than taking over and solving the problems for them.
  • The Victim needs to accept the challenge, and admit their vulnerabilities. Be accountable but also seek the appropriate guidance.

Resources and Slides

Some of the resources mentioned during this session included:

Thank you

Thank you again to our presenter, Kate Edwards-Davis for sharing, our volunteers Nosh, Gwen and Steve, and our host and Zoom sponsors, Cogent – who help companies build great products loved by millions of users, from small startups through to tech giants like Square, Xero and REA.

What to do when someone mentions Product Led Growth – October 2021 Wrap

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What is Product Led Growth?

Product Led Growth is a business strategy where user acquisition, conversion, retention and expansion are all driven primarily by the product itself. 

Moving towards Product Led Growth can be beneficial (for the right products), with reduced acquisition costs or reliance on sales teams, as your customers will be the ones promoting your product. 

Common growth principles

Adopting a Product Led Growth requires a few shifts in mentality and approach:

  • Company-wide alignment, so that growth is not reliant or led only by the product team;
  • Showing rather than telling mindset;
  • Don’t just rely on sales, invest in customer success;
  • Create viral loops, or opportunities to delight customers, that encourage them to refer others; and
  • Help your customers succeed in the job they are trying to achieve, rather than constantly trying to cross-sell or upsell them with additional features or products. If you use a Freemium model, are features locked behind a paywall, preventing your customers from winning?

Common growth myths

Like any new framework, there are often misconceptions. Some of the common ones include:

  • Only the product team is responsible for growth.

No, Product Led Growth is a business strategy, which requires alignment across the whole company, so that different areas work together as their collective efforts ultimately create the user experience.

  • All products can achieve explosive viral growth.

No, growth usually happens through incremental cycles. Help your users be successful, and then make it easier for them to tell other people that might find your product valuable. 

  • A replacement for your marketing and sales strategy.

No, Product Led Growth should complement your marketing and sales strategy, and can even make it more efficient.

Product Led Growth in Action

Some examples of companies applying Product Led Growth, include:

  • Zoom – Referring colleagues and friends combined with their seamless onboarding meant new customers could be up and running, and on a call (receiving value) within 10 seconds. They also employed a freemium model, with free calls up to 40 minutes, and a subscription to unlock longer calls and other features.  
  • AirBnB – Not only using beautiful photos to make rental listings more attractive (and thereby increasing conversion) they also added value by reverse engineering Craigslist’s API so that they could automatically post on behalf of the owners (and increase reach).

Dave took us through some of his own experiences, as the founder Tuki Health. 

Tuki Health was a startup focussed on gut health, starting its journey as a direct to consumer (B2C) offering, providing expert clinical dietician advice and meal plans. 

  • Acquisition: As part of their initial research, they identified a great number of potential users. Through Facebook groups and targeted campaigns, they were able to acquire 7000+ users, and gain in depth insights about customer behaviour. 
  • Activation: Beginning with a quick and simple signup process, they eventually introduced friction, to slow users down, so that they could better understand value (access to actual dieticians, etc).
  • Revenue (and Pivot): Tuki Health provided some great customer outcomes. However, it was extremely difficult to get people to upgrade past the freemium offering to become paying customers. The unit economics didn’t work, which caused them to pivot to a Health SaaS targeting dieticians.
  • Referral: Dieticians had different goals compared to end-users. They didn’t care about collecting hundreds of data points, they just wanted to get the plans, send them out, and move on to the next customer. With this insight, Tuki was able to focus on getting their meal plan creation down from 10 mins to 1 min. This generated real value for the dieticians, and helped them to start referring Tuki Health to others.
  • Referral and Acquisition: But, dieticians are bad at sales. So Tuki created landing pages that made it easier for dieticians to refer to others. 

Key Takeaways

  • For PLG to work, you need to be providing a lot of value with your product.
  • Prioritise analytics.
  • Large companies have big silos. Connect and align the different areas with the Pirate Metrics Framework.
  • Design and develop viral loops into your product.
  • Experiment often and share learnings with key team members.
  • Establish psychological safety among teams, this leads to great collaboration and a great team environment.

Our Speaker

Dave McManus is an experienced product professional with over 12 years experience. He loves working with multidisciplinary teams to solve problems through thoughtful design and engineering solutions.

He has had the pleasure of working with many great companies from large fortune 500’s like: Microsoft, The North Face and Proctor and Gamble to name a few. Originally from Melbourne, Dave also lived in San Francisco for 5 years and founded a digital healthcare company and worked with many different startups including NextVR (acquired by Apple), Innit, Cool Effect (kickstarter for climate change) and many more.

Further Reading and Resources

ProdAnon-DaveMcManus-Oct2021

Thank you

A big thank you to our speaker Dave McManus, our volunteers Gwen, Steve and Nosh, and to our event sponsors, Pluralsight/A Cloud Guru and Cogent.

After Research: Creating Useful & Well-Executed Research Outcomes

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So you’ve completed your customer interviews – but now what?

How do you make sure that you’re creating the right insights based on all of your data? How do you advocate for your findings across product development, especially when they conflict with business objectives?

In this presentation, Jess will share how to set yourself up for success in the most important part of the user research journey – After Research. Learn how to effectively synthesise your qualitative data, create reusable and actionable insights & advocate your research across your team.

RSVP Thursday February 24, 2022

Our Speaker:

Jess Nichols

Jess Nichols – Principal, Research & Insights, Pluralsight
Jess is a research leader at Pluralsight (formerly A Cloud Guru), where she helps teach the world to cloud. She has spent the past decade focusing on discovering actionable insights through qualitative research approaches to ensure customer centricity across the product journey. Throughout her career she has worked globally, including several years based in San Francisco, working for companies such as Twitter, Uber and Deloitte.

Our Host:

TBD – we’re working out if this will be via zoom, in person or hybrid

End of Year product mega meetup!

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Come and join the Australian Product Management community for a massive social and informative event as we discuss some ideas about what it means to be “Product-Led”.

This years Product Party unites the communities of Product Talks, Product Women, Product Mavens, Product Book Club and Product Anonymous – this is the one meetup to join them all!

Details and RSVP info here. Thursday December 2nd

What is the theme?
The topic for our special guest speakers to address will be:
“Can you have Product Led Growth without a Product Led Culture?”

In addition to the hosted speakers and Q&A opportunities there will be fun networking events and giveaways.

Where is the Event?
The Product Party will be an online event via Zoom so we can bring together several cities.
You must pre-register with the zoom link provided once you RSVP to access the event.

Event Sponsor – Amplitude.com
This year’s Product Party is proudly sponsored by Amplitude. Amplitude is a product analytics platform that helps businesses to track visitors with the help of collaborative analytics. The platform uses behavioural reports to understand users’ interactions with products and provides insights to accelerate work on a real-time basis.
Website: https://amplitude.com/

A Practical Guide to Customer Feedback – July 2021 Wrap

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We can always benefit from getting closer to our customers. But how should we go about it? In July, Dipa Rao shared some stories from the trenches, and some practical advice to help us navigate our way through. 

When do we need customer feedback?

Always! We should get customer feedback as often as possible. And at different stages of the product life-cycle.

  • Understanding the problem space: What are the problems our customers are trying to solve? What are their current solutions and alternatives? What are the gaps?
  • Validating solutions or ideas: What is attracting new customers, and is there information or data that they want to carry forward? Or perhaps designing a mockup to gauge interest, before completely building out new functionality.
  • Prioritisation: We often have ideas from many different sources, such as from our call centre and frontline colleagues, management or even directly from our customers. But where should we start? Surveying our customers to rank importance can be beneficial, to ensure we direct our limited and precious resources in the right places.
  • Any change, big or small: Depending on the size of the change, we can employ different techniques to gather feedback, from limited betas to feedback forms post launch.

How to get feedback?

When designing a method to gather feedback, there is no perfect solution. Depending on our skill sets and resources, this could end up looking different for each of us. Net Promoter Score (NPS) could be a good start. However, it is not specific by design, so it may not entirely meet our needs.

Whether we decide to use email, or create an in context web/app form, or even instrumenting a survey with google analytics, try to make it:

  • Easy;
  • Have minimal set up; and
  • Repeatable

How to prepare?

Expectations: Letting both our internal and external stakeholders know what to anticipate will often make our lives easier. 

External customers – Why are you asking me? When will I hear back? Will I hear back? What are alternative paths for support?

Internal customers – Awareness of our activities for support (if needed). Sharing feedback and insights, some which may be distressed feedback.

Analysis: Ensure there is time and capacity to analyse feedback, before trying to get it. If not, don’t bother getting it and wasting our customers’ time. We may also need to mash data together from different systems, so finding an easy and/or repeatable process will be important.

Bureaucrazy! Never underestimate the amount of bureaucracy that may exist in large corporations. From setting up a shared email address, standing up a new platform, covering the legal and privacy aspects of engaging with customers, or ensuring our proposition is aligned to our marketing and brand guidelines. All of these things can take time. 🙁

Types of feedback

When the feedback starts rolling in, it can come in different shapes and sizes. So it can be useful to categorise the feedback, and to learn when to take it with a grain of salt.

Shiva (the destroyer): This feedback can be brutal and destroy imperfections. But don’t take it to heart, as this may be more indicative of a lack of loyalty or trust for our overall product, brand or company. Remove the emotion, and take the feedback for what it is. Feedback from Shiva can impact our morale (or our teams), so take in small doses.

Vishnu (the preserver): Feedback from Vishnu is generally pragmatic and more balanced, and can encourage us to keep going. We’re on the right track. 

Devi/Shakti (the creator): We can consider Devi as expert or superusers, who will give detailed feedback, and potentially challenge our thinking or approach. A great way to foster new ideas and allow them to grow.

And then there are ‘other’ types of feedback. 

Got feedback, now what?

Once we have feedback, we should analyse and share the insights. Feed the other parts of the business. Construct a shared understanding. The feedback can also help motivate our teams. And where possible, we can also respond, to open a dialogue, so that we can build empathy with our customers, to allow us to build better products.

Thank you

A big thank you to Dipa Rao, our volunteers Gwen and Nosh, and to our generous host and Zoom sponsor, A Cloud Guru – they’re on a mission to teach the world to cloud.

Resources and Slides

You can find Dipa on LinkedIn and Twitter. 

Some of the resources mentioned during this session included:

November Short Talks

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November is the ProdAnon birthday! RSVP for November 18th!

Over the years, we’ve mixed it up with purely social birthday drinks to give you more time to get to know each other (& Liz and I are not averse to a lovely cocktail or wine) or the usual speaker topic session – but last year we tried something different and it worked well so here we go…

One of the big reasons Product Anonymous exists is to share knowledge. Another reason we exist is to grow the local talent which includes giving people the opportunity to gain experience in front of a crowd & crafting a talk. We’re super proud that several ProdAnon speakers have gone on talk at large conferences like Leading the Product & Web Directions.

So what is this November thing?
It’s time to dip your toe in the water. Yes, you!

We want you to present – for 5 minutes. It’s not a long talk, you won’t have to answer 15 questions after, nor do you need to create earth-shattering beautiful slides.

What you need to do is know what you want to express, to teach, to explain, to get ProdAnon folks excited about.

You need to be able to communicate that in FIVE minutes (warning: Liz will have her whistle). And you need to be available to do this on Thursday evening November 18th.

This is not a ‘lightning talk’. You do not have to change slides every 15 seconds and have only 20 slides. It’s your 5 minutes. It can be fun. It can be serious. It could be an insight you want to share.

What to do next?

– Mull over your idea and submit it by EOD Saturday, October 23rd
– Those chosen will be contacted on Friday, October 29th (yes, this is encouraging you to spend Melbourne Cup wknd working on your preso!)

Submit your talk idea!

How will talks be selected?
– Appeal of the topic to ProdAnon people
– Your sworn ability to be able to use google slides and deliver the slides the week before the event

Not interested in giving a talk?

Then come along to support your product peeps and hear some interesting talks!!!

RSVP for November 18th 6:20pm

What to do when someone mentions PLG (product led growth)

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Product Led Growth (PLG) has become a bit of a buzz word in recent times but what does it really mean? How does it impact companies using the methodology and the product people who work within that methodology? RSVP

PLG means the actual product drives user acquisition, expansion, conversion and retention. That means company-wide alignment across teams – from engineering to sales and marketing – around the product as the largest source of sustainable, scalable business growth

Dave McManus will share his lived experience of working with this space. He’ll share experiments he’s run, success and failures and tips for how you can influence others in your company to move towards PLG.

When:

Thursday, October 21st on Zoom – 6:20pm ‘doors open’ to say hello! 6:30pm we start. Bring along dinner, bubs, beverages

RSVP

Our Speaker:

Dave McManus is an experienced product professional with over 12 years experience. He loves working with multidisciplinary teams to solve problems through thoughtful design and engineering solutions.

He has had the pleasure of working with many great companies from large fortune 500’s like: Microsoft, The North Face and Proctor and Gamble to name a few. Originally from Melbourne, Dave also lived in San Francisco for 5 years and founded a digital healthcare company and worked with many different startups including NextVR (acquired by Apple), Innit, Cool Effect (kickstarter for climate change) and many more.

He’s passionate about product led growth and looking forward to sharing stories with you all.

www.djmgrowth.com
https://twitter.com/D_Mack7

Our Sponsor:

Cogent – cogent.co – If you need great people to help build your product, we do that and a whole lot more. Over the years, we’ve worked on more 100 digital products loved by millions of users, from small startups through to tech giants like Square, Xero and REA.

So whether you’re leading a small product team or the CPO of a growing tech company, our focus is on supporting you to design and develop products that your users love.

Wrap-Up: The Shape Shifting Product Manager

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Daniel Kinal is a long haul product manager having been in the industry for awhile. Over the years, Daniel realised one of his strengths was being able to shape-shift.

Daniel talked about the various ways product managers are asked to shape shift. We might need to do some copy writing or sketch out a UI or develop a GTM plan or do a sales demo or create some reporting and do data analysis or manage a team or be the scrum master or even CODE (?!??!!!!!!!!).

The list of what we might end up doing goes on & on! There’s always gaps to fill and as a product person, we often feel like we need to help out to make sure our product becomes successful.

But then Daniel realised this might not be a strength. Our jobs are already hard without adding additional work. Shape shifting isn’t the best thing for him – nor the company he works for.

Why? Because we product folks need to focus on the ‘kernal’ – what Daniel calls the true product work. This includes

  • building trust & alignment
  • maximising value in a sustainable way
  • doing course correction
  • and more! (watch the video)

The thing about the ‘kernal’ is, it’s our job. While all these other shape shifting tasks can be done by others (others who hopefully exist at your company), doing the kernal isn’t done by others.

To help us, Daniel has a few meditations on our shape shifting nature…

Product Anonymous would like to thank Daniel for a great talk & convo after. No matter where you are in your product career, you should consider his insight and questions to ponder.

Resources

Daniel Kinal – The Shape Shifting PM – (had a baffling zoom thing happen & DK’s video isn’t appearing)

Our Speaker

Daniel Kinal has been in product management for over 18 years, chiefly working in IT, focusing on B2B products & services.

He began his marketing, communications, and consulting career but soon learned that the aspect of marketing he loved most was working out what to build, for whom, and why.
He gets excited about helping businesses become more effective in decision-making, more efficient in their processes and more engaged with their customers.

Daniel is at his happiest when waving his arms about in front of a whiteboard with a bunch of smart people, exploring problems and weighing up solutions.

Our Sponsor

Cogent – cogent.co – If you need great people to help build your product, we do that and a whole lot more. Over the years, we’ve worked on more 100 digital products loved by millions of users, from small startups through to tech giants like Square, Xero and REA.

So whether you’re leading a small product team or the CPO of a growing tech company, our focus is on supporting you to design and develop products that your users love.

Next Up

Kate Edwards-Davis will be talking about saving your team (or rather, not saving them) from villians on September 30th. Details & RSVP links here.

Why you should never rescue your team from a villain

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Does your team look up to you as some sort of super hero? Who they can rely on to swoop in and protect them from the maleficent deeds of some evil villain? Do you sometimes feel like a victim, a target for others to blame when things don’t play our as we forecast? RSVP

Ah! Welcome to the dynamics of drama! Our efforts to protect others may actually perpetuate a cycle of conflict and anxiety.

Would you like to better understand the common causes of drama & conflict in the workplace – and how you can interrupt that cycle with one of our favourite tools – a POST-IT NOTE!

RSVP to learn how to kill off that drama and setup a winning dynamic of success.

Thursday, September 30th 6:20pm via Zoom

Our Speaker:

Kate Edwards-Davis is a product manager at Karista.com.au

Kate circled around the profession of Product Management for many, many years – starting in the 1980s as an IT Project Manager, switching to Business Analyst, to Product Owner and then finally to Product Manager.

With all of those titles, Kate says she essentially played the same role – listening to the customer, getting to know their most important problems, then working with teams of super clever people to deliver a solution.

Random Kate facts!

  • Kate once pursued a career as a classical musician. She performed solo in a national live broadcast on ABC classic FM. On recorder – yes, that instrument you all played in primary school.
  • She danced with Prince in a small London nightclub.
  • She has a collection of vintage calculators. They fit right into Kate’s very retro 1970’s house. (Wait til you see the fake wood paneling!)
  • She has never ever managed to do a cartwheel.
  • Her kids really don’t understand what she does for work, and frankly don’t care, as their Dad’s work is way cooler. He works in the design team for Moose Toys.
  • She’s still not sure what what she wants to do with her career  :blush:

Our Sponsor:

Cogent

If you need great people to help build your product, we do that and a whole lot more. Over the years, we’ve worked on more 100 digital products loved by millions of users, from small startups through to tech giants like Square, Xero and REA.

So whether you’re leading a small product team or the CPO of a growing tech company, our focus is on supporting you to design and develop products that your users love.