As we get into more details on product management , one most important question to be answered..
Do you know your customer ?
It is one difficult question with no correct answer! I would love to answer "Yes" but I wish it was that easy. There are literally hundreds of ways to segment the users. With all different slicing and dicing and trying to understand the end user , the product manager has to go through a long ride.
There are numerous systems developed and deployed to understand the user behavior. With tremendous resources spent on market research , we get data from multiple reliable sources.
The more interesting and important task here is defining the correct KPIs . Many a times, its not about what all data we have from the user but its about defining the right KPIs.
There are multiple strategies one can apply to understand the customer , starting from the customer journey maps to user segmentation , analyzing the historical data based on the time of the day , Day of the week , Week of the month , season of the year !
Understanding the end and having an impeccable customer experience are two key tasks owned by the product manager.
From what I have realized is nothing can beat conducting the end user interviews and accompanying them in the real life scenarios. When you are actually with the end user in the real life scenario , you tend to understand the issues. You see when is the end user delighted and when does he isn't happy with your product. It gives you details on improving the user experience.
As an example, the placement of the option and the changed priority can actually improve the feature utilization 2X! (I have experienced it !)
Sometimes its not about only understanding the user's problems but also about learning what features he likes. That can lead to feature comparison and hence improved product..
May be there are some characteristics of the well accepted features that can be ported to not so liked features and TAAA DAA! It has the potential to change not so liked feature into a widely accepted one!
In a nutshell , Its all about concentrating on the end user. As product people we are bound to be the advocates of our users.
