unfortunate, but there are times when you realize that you don’t have the right customers. Sometimes, you simply acquired people who were originally interested in your product but aren’t excited enough about it to pay you or to stick around long term. They’re happy to occasionally use what you make for free, but they’re not about to give you any money or get their friends to join.
Other times, you can have a very excited group of early adopters, but you realize that the market they represent simply isn’t big enough to sustain the product. This happens a lot when you start with a group of “earlyvangelist” users who tend to be early adopters and have very specific needs that may not scale.
And, of course, sometimes external things happen, and the market itself changes—like streaming video luring people away from video rentals and cable TV. In this case, you might have had an enormous, captive market, but a better, more innovative solution comes along, and suddenly you’re fighting to find a new group of people who want what you make as your original users drift away to the competition.
In order to survive, companies in these situations need to seek out new markets, often by changing their products in ways that will alienate their current or remaining users. This is painful, both to the company and to the customers, especially when they’ve been together from the beginning.
Cindy has been through this twice, at Yodlee and Kissmetrics. In both cases, they had a loyal and enthusiastic user base that simply wasn’t large enough to support the business, and the companies had to make some tough decisions.
This can be one of the hardest decisions you’ll make as a product manager. It’s painful to stop supporting people who have been good customers. It feels awful to hear people complaining about being abandoned. And it’s never fun to voluntarily give up revenue from people who are happily paying you. But if there aren’t enough of them or if they’re not willing to pay you enough, sometimes this step is necessary, and you’re better off doing it quickly.
Why This Is So Important
In the long run, it’s equally important to identify and support your real customers and not try to satisfy people who aren’t the right customers. You want to spend your time and money where they’ll do the most good, and you can’t prioritize effectively if you’re trying to please everybody.
Finding the right customers means spending the time to really understand who your users are and why, and that means spending time studying the people who love your product and the people who don’t. Combine quantitative and qualitative data to get a better picture of who your best customers are and what value you’re providing to them, and don’t be afraid to go after a different customer if it’s absolutely necessary.
For more advice on getting to know your customers, read Cindy’s book, Lean Customer Development: Building Products Your Customers Will Buy, and check out her blog at cindyalvarez.com, which has fantastic posts on customer development, building a culture of research, and product management.
CHAPTER 3
Do Better Research
Exercise: Picking a Research Topic
Exercise: Picking a Research Methodology
The Most Important Methodologies
The Dangers of Picking Research Methodologies
Once you have an idea of who your user is, you’re going to need to get to know them better. This is harder than it sounds. A huge mistake that I see non-researchers make when they start doing user research is that they just go out and start talking to people.
They’ll accost people at a coffee shop and ask whether they like a particular product. Or they’ll do a usability test to figure out if somebody will buy. Or they’ll send out a survey to decide what feature to build next. Or they’ll do a focus group.
These sorts of “studies” are all worse than useless. They are actively harmful to your product development process. Not only do they not give you the kind of information that you’re looking for, but they also can give you incorrect information. It’s not that these particular research methodologies can’t be useful. They’re incredibly useful when used for the right thing (well, except for focus groups). The problem is that they’re so often used incorrectly.
Take talking to people in coffee shops. Getting 20 people to smile politely at you while you pitch them your idea does not constitute validation of your market. People are generally polite, and most of them will nod encouragingly and agree that your product is going to be fantastic in exchange for a $5 Frappuccino. Even if they didn’t lie just to get you to go away, they’d still be incapable of telling you whether or not they would use your product, largely because the chances that you found someone at random who meets your target persona is extremely low.
On the other hand, coffee shop research can be used very effectively if you’re looking for simple usability testing of an onboarding flow for a general consumer product. In other words, you can use this sort of testing to figure out if people are able to use your products, but unless you’re selling coffee or coffee shop related items, you can’t find out if anybody wants to buy your new product by asking people you find at Starbucks.
The reason that people fall back on things like coffee shop testing or simple usability studies is that those types of testing are easy. They’re quick. They’re a thing that you can go out and do right now. When the thing you’re trying to learn is answered by one of those methods, they can be powerful, but there are more research techniques in the world than those, and it’s worth learning which ones will help you learn what you really need to know.
First, you have to figure out exactly what you want to learn.
EXERCISE
Picking a Research Topic
Time for you to do a little work. Write down what you’re going to learn at your next user research study. Not the things that you’re going to learn from your users. You can’t know that yet. Write down the topic of the study. Take five minutes and think about it; then come back.
Did you write down things like:
• I want to know how much people will pay me for my product.
• I want my customers to tell me which feature to build next.
• I want to know if people will use my product.
• I want to know how to change my UX.
