In this ProductTank San Francisco talk, Brian Tran, Director of Product Management at User Testing, shows us how we can become better product people by supercharging our data with human insights. His key points include:
- What makes a product great?
- Making decisions
- Qualitative and quantitative data together
Watch the video to see Brian’s talk in full. Or read on for an overview of his key points.
What makes a product great?
A product starts with the product manager making a decision. Amazing products are viable, desirable and feasible. Products are built by focusing on a process that includes some form of understanding a problem, finding a way to solve that problem, making a plan, building a product and then making tweaks until the product successfully solves the problem. For product managers, this process is likely happening for multiple products, at the same time. Also, the process is iterative, meaning that it doesn’t just happen once and it’s done. Instead, it’s a continuous process.
Making decisions
Product managers are always making decisions about something using the data that is available to them. They usually go about making these decisions by drawing on some form of quantitative data like A/B testing to help them. However, many A/B tests fail or are inconclusive. It’s not only important to know that a customer has a specific preference, as a product manager it’s important to also understand why customers make the decisions they do. This requires qualitative data to be used in conjunction with quantitative data.
Qualitative and quantitative data together
The purpose of building a product is to satisfy a specific job to be done. Customers have a specific set of needs that must be met. Data collected qualitatively and quantitatively should be able to tell you what job needs to be done and if that problem is currently being solved by a product on the market. Focusing on the underserved area of customer needs will lead to good outcomes. By humanizing the data product managers can also learn the best ways to price their products and how to optimize them.
The key takeaways from Brian’s talk are that using quantitative and qualitative data together helps to humanize the data and create a better customer experience. The companies that build the best customer experiences with their products will see the best overall returns.
