Everyone, welcome. And thank you for joining today. My name is Nate Wright. I'm the VP of Product Marketing at user testing. Very excited to be here today to be talking through some strategies, best practices and examples for how you can iterate more effectively by using customer feedback. So first, just a little bit about me and why I'm passionate about this topic. During my career, I've had the opportunity to work with tech companies big and small, oftentimes working to bring new products, services or platforms to market. And I'm passionate about this because this has been a real need for me as a product marketer in my career, we found is that it's been oftentimes easier to launch, build and iterate on an offering than it is to actually capture and incorporate customer feedback at the same pace. And the result is that, at times, decisions are made with incomplete data. Or worse yet, with gut instinct. In my more recent experiences, I've had the opportunity to work with founders or early stage operators who are facing similar challenges. So this talk today really reflects what I've learned as a practitioner, and also someone has worked with me clients across the years on these types of problems. When I think about what it takes to be successful in starting a new business and scaling a new venture, I really think it starts with a deep understanding of a customer problem that you're looking to solve. So just a quick few quick examples here. The first is ferruccio Lamborghini ferruccio, was a successful businessman after World War Two, he had started his own tractor company with the name Lamborghini. He also loves sports cars, and he loved his Ferrari. But he oftentimes had problems with the clutch on his Ferrari would slip under acceleration. As a mechanic, he kind of understood how it worked and understood how it can work better. So we set off to build the perfect car company to solve the problem that he was having. Katrina lake of Stitch Fix was also looking to solve the problem that she had, she wanted to work at the intersection of fashion and technology and data. And she found that no company out there was really, you know, doing this in the way that she thought it could work. She had the insight that the way that people wanted to shop for clothing online didn't match the model of the day. I'm kind of paraphrasing Katrina here, she said that people don't want to browse through 1000s of pairs of jeans to find the right one. They just want one pair of jeans that fits them perfectly. Then the last one here is Daniel Eck and Martin Lorenson of Spotify, who were looking to us to create alternatives to the existing music industry models. At the time, the alternatives were either to buy music, buy the album, which was expensive, really reflecting the business models of the record companies, or to listen to music, illegally through services like Napster. Clearly, customers love the ability to be able to stream songs whenever they wanted. But this post huge challenges for the record companies EQT realized that kind of litigation was not going to solve this problem. The only way to solve the problem was to create new models that were better and more convenient for consumers. So the thing that that really ties all these these stories together is that they all were founders who were able to identify and address real customer problems. As Daniel EQT, put it here, the value of a company is the sum of the problems that you solve. For companies, you know, understanding the customer problem is not always enough, though, starting a new business is notoriously difficult. And there's all sorts of challenges for you overcome, including intense competition, rapidly changing market dynamics, and naming changes in customer behavior. If you look at the top reasons why startups fail, you can see many of the various challenges that combine to kill startups. So this is a list that was compiled by CB insights. As you scan this list, there's probably many things here that would reflect things you'd expect. As I look, I see things like no market need, or user unfriendly product, or just ignoring customers that ultimately speaks to a lack of product market fit. Even things like running out of cash or not the right team or getting out competed, I think also kind of speak to this lack of fit. So if I will work to boil this down to its core, I think it comes down to two key challenges. Both have their own key questions. The first is building the right product understanding, is this a real customer problem? Is the market big enough? And then the second is building the product, right? Is the solution that you're building, solving the actual problem for the customer? Is it going to justify and create sufficient sufficient value to justify the expense in terms of cost resources and time for the customer? And I think both of these speak to the question of do I have product market fit?
So customer feedback can be critical to helping you address both of these questions. And related to do this effectively you need to be testing validating and iterating through the entire product development lifecycle and incorporating customer feedback at all of these phases, everything from the initial insight to validating concepts to actually testing and validating your prototypes to building and launching. And then you know, it doesn't really stop there, either. Because you're you're oftentimes iterating, the experience, introducing new features or capabilities, addressing new markets. So in this way, it's a process that's kind of always running in your ability to learn from customers. And to improve your experience based on what you learn is really what separates those who will be successful from those who are not. There are lots of sources of customer feedback, everything from direct customer interviews, to survey data to in product analytics, these are all really important sources of information and sources about your customer signals about your customer. I'm not here to promote maybe one over the other. But I am here to talk about the ways you can do everything more effectively if you're actually able to build the voice of the customer, what they see, feel, say and do into your process. So just a couple of quotes I want to share here. I know it's a cliche, but the first quote here is from Jeff Bezos, I just couldn't resist. He says that good inventors and designers deeply understand their customer. They spend tremendous understand tremendous energy developing that intuition. They study and understand many anecdotes rather than only the averages you find on surveys. And again, this goes to this idea of understanding how our customers actually think and behave rather than just the behavior you see and things like your product analytics. And the second quote is from another Jeff in Silicon Valley, this is Jeff Lawson of Twilio. He says you listen to customer feedback, you can ship updates, and improve the product based on their feedback. And then you have to get good at doing that. Because if you don't your competitors, well, a little bit later, he says that's a superpower of software. So it's not a matter of building it once it means you, you have to keep building it. And to me, this highlights the the ongoing nature of this as well as it being a core competency and core capability of a company. You have to be able to test, learn and iterate based on customer feedback. If you're able to do that you're gonna be able to move faster, you're also going to be able to move more effectively, you're essentially improving both the speed and effectiveness of your flywheel. So when I talk to people working in different companies, including startups, the idea is pretty uncontroversial. You know, people inherently understand the benefits and the value of talking to their customers. And I think most people strive to do this. But still, there's a disconnect between kind of what we say we do, or what we say we want to do, and kind of what actually happens in reality. So just a couple of salient stats here. The first is from Harvard Business Review, they found that CEOs, on average only spend 3% of their time actually interacting with customers. And then a separate source is PNF, Product Management trends and benchmark report found that product managers on average only spend 7% of their time interacting with customers. So, you know, clearly these people aren't spending as much time with with customers as they maybe would like, I think this is a story that, you know, these stats incorporate both kind of early and later stage company, I think early stage companies do this better. But still maybe don't do this as much as they would like. And the problem with this is that you're not building that intuition and empathy with your customer, you're not able to kind of see the experience to your customers eyes, which can be challenging when you're trying to build solutions to solve their needs. So again, people kind of get the value of talking to customers and iterating based on feedback, but they don't do it as much as they'd like. And And why is that? I think it's just because it's hard. It's challenging. Everything from it's difficult to find the audience logistically scheduling time and making time to do that, actually structuring conversations in ways that maximizes the value of those interactions. How do you analyze those learnings? How do you do that in a way that allows you to objectively review results, first kind of confirming your priors around the way you think it should be? Depending on the size of your org, it can be difficult to capture and share and make those learnings accessible, probably or across time. And then finally, I think this is the one that's you know, probably the most important, it's it's just hard, it's time consuming to do this. And time is your most precious resource as a startup founder. So making the time to do this can be difficult. So you have to make sure you're doing it as effectively as possible. So you know, with that backdrop, where people understand the value of talking to their customers, and its ability to help you get to product market fit and ultimately be successful, I think that can huge benefits for those organizations who can do this more this practice more effectively and more efficiently. So if the rest of the time here I'm going to talk about some of the different ways you can do this practice better. I'll cover a few you know, key phases of the process here and also show you some examples and best practices from successful companies where I can.
So the first phase here is understanding customer needs and developing so So at this stage, you're oftentimes maybe pre product or even pre concept, you may be looking to understand the problems, the problem space, understanding your target audience needs and frustrations and identifying which problems you want to solve. So some sample questions you may be looking to address or who is my target audience? What do they think feel, say and do and why? What are their unmet needs? What problems do they need solves? How come those problems haven't been solved yet? How cute is the problem? Is this something that is really, really painful for this person or something they can kind of get around with, with without too much trouble. And then how big is the problem, including how big is the market. As a product marketer, I've had the opportunity to work with lots of great product managers, designers, researchers over my career to develop and bring new offerings to market. And oftentimes those start with great discovery interviews. So I've included a set of questions here. But really to give you a sense of of what these these interviews might look like, in our own context, this is a b2b context. But obviously, this would be adjusted if you're talking to a user or customer in a different industry. So some of the questions here include things like Tell me about your role? Tell me what you do on a typical day, what sorts of tools or or processes do you use to do those, those things you're looking to do. And really, these discovery interviews are meant to be maybe 80% needs discovery, and 10 to 20% solutions, if show solutions at all. And you really try to get into the mind of your user or your customer at this point, trying to understand what they deeply care about, you can pay up build better solutions that meet their needs. So one example of a company who does this really effectively is slack. And they really did this very early on in their lifecycle as a company. So slack was famously started as gaming and online gaming touches a company called glitch. And they developed the core concept for the app, building something for their own teams to use to communicate and collaborate, collaborate on that solution. When they kind of shut down the game, they realized that there might be legs in the offering they had developed and that it might be useful for other companies as well. But they wanted to validate that in market. And they did that by interviewing and talking to lots of their customers. They started talking to their friends and family and progressively moved on to talk to bigger and more sophisticated teams. And the feedback that they gathered, actually gave them greater conviction that the problem is that they were building, the problem they were addressing was big and important, even if they were educating users and potential customers along the way around what that problem was, as they, you know, launched their offering and beta, they made active listening a core competency of the company, collecting feedback from all different sources, including social listening support calls direct conversations, Butterfield describes the company is being really fastidious about tagging all of these incoming messages and sources of feedback, calling them and making them available later. And, you know, I think this really speaks to this idea of having a plan going in being able to systematically collect and act on feedback and making sure that's available to everyone in your organization over time. Another example is Canva. So Canva is a design platform, they offer a freemium experience, and then the ability to buy professional kind of offerings and capabilities. On top of that Canva had a ton of kind of buzz and, and press before they actually launched their first experience. And they really want to make sure that that first time user experience that first onboarding experience was as good as it could be, especially since they were operating in a freemium model that that onboarding experience was so critical. They did a ton of testing with their customers ahead of their initial launch, to understand what they wanted in a solution. And ultimately what their needs were so they could build a better onboarding experience. As Melanie Perkins, their founder and CEO put it, it helped them to understand what their users needed on both the UX and an emotional level, based on, you know, the feedback and kind of learnings that they were able to gain the you know, launch with great success growing to more than 10 million users in just a few months.
So maybe some tips and best practices summarizing for this section about understanding customer needs and developing solutions. The first is to have a plan going in, be deliberate about how you're going to collect feedback, including the format, the process, how you're gonna actually run those conversations. Second, build a framework, have a plan going in for how you're going to evaluate evaluate decisions, how you evaluate the problem set and the space that you're looking to solve. Be sure to capture and organize all of those learnings. Find a way to tag and record learnings. It's a big investment in terms of time and energy. You want to make sure that this can be accessed later and you're getting as much bang for your buck out of those conversations. Also, you may not have unlimited opportunities to you know, talk to people that you're looking to talk to Especially if they might be kind of senior stakeholders that you're kind of getting access to. And fourth, you know, be deliberate about that audience. You know, it's great if you can reach out to family and friends to give you feedback. But you obviously want to get as close to your target audience. And as close to the mindset of your buyers, you can, it's easy to be, you know, kind of biased on your feedback among kind of friendly kind of stakeholders. But it's important to get feedback from kind of all stakeholders to make sure you're doing things most effectively. Okay, so the next thing we're going to talk about is communicating your value prop and attracting your early customers. So here, you may have a product to maybe you know, at the stage of attracting your first customers or even entering kind of your early growth phase. And here, you want to ensure that you're framing your offering in the best way, and that your message is actually resonating with customers. So sample questions you might include would be, you know, what do you value most in a product? How do you evaluate one product or service versus another versus doing nothing, and you know, does the message and the framing of that message resonate? So one thing that's really critical to testing at this stage is your value proposition, your category and the framing of your offering in the minds of your customer. As an early stage company, how you frame that offering is gonna be critical to your success. And gathering customer feedback can be a great way of understanding how your customers might naturally think about you. And if they would resonate with different kinds of framings of that offering. So it's a pretty simple framework here, you can think about creating a frame of reference as being the kind of the point of the, the way that people would think about it, as well as, think about the point of parody and the point of differentiation, you're looking to express your solution in terms of a problem that a customer already has, by trying to you know some way they think about the problem already. And then you want to communicate the value and how your solution will help to solve that problem. And then by creating the point of parity, you're both giving them an anchor in terms of how that would look for other offerings, as well as then providing the point of differentiation of how you're better and different than the offering. So just an example here, and I think one that shows how this can evolve over time is Uber. So early on Ubers positioning was against taxi cabs, and that was a frame of reference. And before that, it was it was black cars. But as you can see here, their point of parody was really the existing taxi experience, it was able to get you from one point to another. And their point of differentiation at this stage was the fact that you could order with your smartphone on demand. Later, as they started to think about the market much bigger. And think about this against the frame of reference of transportation, the points of parity were the points of parity versus car ownership or public transportation, the fact that you could get where you needed to go whenever you need to do that. And at that point, their points of differentiation changed, it became more about affordability and convenience and safety. So one thing that's you know, hopefully obvious here is that it's about much more than messaging alone. This is your strategic, you know, position in the market, your category, and how you actually framing your offering and can have implications, you know, far beyond messaging. And all of this really needs to be tested with real customer feedback to ensure you're maximizing your opportunity for success. Another thing, great thing to consider is capturing customer feedback on your offering versus your competitors. And that really speaks to the the frame of reference for points of parity. So he may remember this competitive campaign a little bit dated now but a famous one this is the Mac first PCs going to play this really quick.
Hello, I'm American, I'm a PC they are man. Oh, thanks, PC, Microsoft Office 2008 just came out for Mac. So you're gonna be doing a lot more work. I figured you'd need one of those babies. Great. What is it exactly, that's a stress toy. Never seen a stress toy. Just give it a squeeze and some stresses you out like right Oh, Mac just got the latest version of Microsoft Office. Mac can do all the office stuff you can do. PC, this is a good thing you shouldn't really, you and Mac are so compatible. I want to transfer all my files over to Mac squeeze.
So the thing to remember here is you don't have to have a multi billion dollar ad budget to be able to understand and effectively position against your competitors. This is something that everyone can test. This is all something actually can test before you even have a product or concept in market. Being able to understand the existing offerings out there, what people love about those offerings and maybe where they're frustrated. And there's areas of opportunity and whitespace is a great way to kind of get started. So this is another you know, really important area for you to test and incorporate customer feedback into your process. Hello. So a few key ideas to remember for the stage. The first is to prioritize your value proposition. Be sure to really focus on testing the way that your core audience is going to perceive your message and how you're framing your offering. The second is to test early and often build space into the process to test even when testing is not easy. So you know before you're you're out there in market There's still ways to test and get feedback and validate that the messaging and the positioning, maybe putting in marketing is the right 1/3 is to understand where you stand, test not just your value, Prop, and the way that you message but understand how you fit versus your competition. Think about the ways that your customer considers your competition versus yourselves in market and look for those areas of opportunity. And then consider how it's going to evolve over time, this isn't kind of a one shot deal, market dynamics change, your offering changes, customer expectations change. And throughout all of that your messaging and offering needs to shift as well, you need to test that at every phase. Okay, theurge kind of phase of the journey is about optimizing all phases of the customer journey. So here, you might have a product in market, you might have a establish your value prop. It might be things about more about growth and optimization of these stages. And some sample questions you might be looking to solve or get answers to, why is my customer doing what they're doing in my product? What are the reasons behind the trends I'm seeing in my data? And how can I improve the product, the performance within my product, whether it be the new user flow, the conversion funnel, or my marketing channels, or whatever you may be looking to optimize. So the thing I want to talk about within this section is often something I see with companies at this stage. At this stage, we have much more data about your users with an established product and market. And you can see how they're using your offering. And as the saying goes kind of what gets measured gets improved. And I often times see companies at this stage, focus much more time on testing and analytics. And they sort of spend less time and de emphasize actually talking to customers. Again, there's nothing wrong with with data and analytics, it's it's really gonna be critical to your success in terms of understanding your customer signals. But there's something lost when you focus only on those sources at the cost of actually talking to your customers. So earlier in this presentation, I shared the Jeff Bezos quote where he talked about needing to understand the anecdotes to be able to build up the intuition to solve customer needs. Another great kind of way I think about this in a framework comes from Trisha Wang, who's a photographer, she has a framework of comparing juxtaposing big data to thick data, big data being those insights you get from many, many data points, large sample sizes, you know, through that you can get a great signal about your customer and what they're looking to do with your product. But supplementing that with thick data can be a great strategy as well. Thick data is the insights you get from smaller, smaller sample sizes, but also have lots more depth. And Trisha puts it well here she says that tick data grounds, our business questions and human questions, you get to also work with data that hasn't been collected, you get to ask questions about why why is this happening? So when you think about analytics, oftentimes, that's a reflection of kind of what's happened in the past, what do people do historically with your product or service, whereas qualitative data, and the ability to actually talk to customers can get you to go deeper, get you to anticipate what they might do in the future.
