my landlord, get a quote from a technician to fix it, argue with my landlord about the cost, get another quote, and so on. Yet, I wasn’t doing that for some reason. I didn’t care enough about this problem to solve it properly.
Why I Wrote This Book
My story isn’t unique. We all have problems that we work around for one reason or another instead of doing the logical thing. In my story, the important problem was my relationship with my landlord, not the frozen keypad. It’s the same thing with product development and user research. In far too many cases, people, teams, and organizations develop products that nobody needs, that do not solve any problem, or even worse, solve problems that users don’t care enough about.
In this book, you’ll learn how to answer your most burning questions about your users (or potential users) with quick-and-dirty research techniques that anyone can apply. You’ll learn (among other things) how to identify what users really need, who these users are, and how they currently solve problems they care about.
The Structure of the Book
The structure of this book is simple: it’s based on interviews I held with 200 startup founders, enterprise product managers, and venture capitalists from all over the world. During those interviews, I asked what questions they asked themselves about their users (or future users). I gathered hundreds such questions together, which I then, with the help of 50 entrepreneurs, organized into eight groups. Each group of questions was summarized into one question, which became a chapter in this book. Furthermore, each chapter is a step-by-step, how-to guide that answers the question at stake with one to three user research methods (see Figure I.2).
FIGURE I.2 Each question (asked in a different stage of a product’s lifecycle) represents a chapter in the book.
Goals of This Book
The clear result of my interviews with 200 product managers and startup founders was that there’s a need for lean user research guidance that is specific, approachable, and easy to implement. The following are the goals set for this book.
Change How People Answer Their Most Burning Questions About Users
Probably the most important finding of my research was uncovering the top questions that product managers, startup founders, and venture capitalists ask themselves about their users or potential users (see Figure I.3). The good news is that they ask the right questions. Not only that, but they even know the order of importance of these questions. Sadly, the bad news is that people answer these questions in invalid, unreliable, and sometimes unbelievable ways. Here are some representative examples:
• Who are my customers?
“We look at analytics data.”
• Do people need my product?
“Doh, of course they do, because we created it.”
• Is the product usable?
“We focus on UX. We use the product ourselves.”
• Is our product better than the competition?
“We have no competition,” then (after acknowledging they do),
“We do things differently.”
• Is our product getting better?
“We improve it all the time, so yes.”
• Do people want the product?
“I asked my sister, and she said yes.”
FIGURE I.3 The top questions product development practitioners, startup founders, and venture capitalists ask themselves.
Shorten the Road Between Wanting to Do Research and Actually Doing It
This book will show you how to do research, including detailed steps, templates, examples, videos, resources, and practice exercises. You’ll have everything you need to start your own research to answer your questions about users. Basically, you’ll have everything you need with this book, its companion website (leanresearch.co), and YouTube Channel (bit.ly/validating-youtube).
Change Perceptions About Research
Let’s face it—people often have incorrect perceptions and myths associated with user research. This book changes those perceptions and hopefully busts the following myths:
• Research is academic.
• Research is time-consuming.
• Research is very expensive.
• Only an elite squad of PhDs can do research.
• Research isn’t actionable.
• Research can’t help in making high-risk product design and roadmap decisions.
• Lean user research is all about A/B testing and analyzing analytics data.
Change the Source of Product Ideas
Eighty-six percent of people interviewed for this book testified that their product or startup idea came from pain they had experienced personally. For example, I interviewed a software engineer who lost track of her child at the beach and was frantic until good people helped find him. That engineer started a company that introduced an app to solve this problem. Or a young computer science student who had been coding since he was 9 years old and had an idea for a really smart way of identifying spaghetti code and decided to patent and frame it into a service package.
There’s no doubt that personal pain signals there’s an opportunity to solve a problem. Many entrepreneurs are sure they have a problem worth solving due to their own personal experience. But, they often fail to recognize that an almost tangible “fact” in their mind is just an assumption that should be tested, validated, or most likely, invalidated. Figure I.4 shows what 200 product managers and startup founders told me about where ideas for products come from. Notice that user research is last with only two percent of my interviewees.
FIGURE I.4 The vast majority of ideas for new products and services
