‘Everything Around Us Is a Product,’ — Says Nika, Product Heroes Course Ex-producer

9 minutes

11.01.2021

‘Everything Around Us Is a Product,’ — Says Nika, Product Heroes Course Ex-producer

Dashly chatbot platform team had a conversation with Nika, UNCRN.me co-founder and ex-CEO, IIDF tracker.

We’ve talked about:

what kind of researches help products to grow,
what mistakes are the most common when conducting research,
how the research process works in startups and enterprises,
what is a product management CJM and how to make it better.

— Do you think researches are in demand in the product management sphere?

I see that many product managers want to improve their product development process, especially the research process. All the companies I’m talking to are craving something new, expecting changes, and improving their product. This is why I’m convinced that researchers are really in demand. But the survivorship bias may appear there, as guys who think that everything is fine rarely come to me.

— What types of researches are the most common?

To begin with, I’d divide all the researches into old school and modern ones. The first type is common in universities. All you need to do is to gather some people for a focus group, give them some money, and they will tell you what you want to hear from them. Everyone is happy, but you won’t get any significant data.

If we look at the bigger picture, we can divide all the researches into two types. The first ones are used correctly, in the appropriate period of time and product development stage, and the second ones are used incorrectly (e.g., A/B tests conducted on five users).

Let’s consider a situation. You’ve got two interface options. There is a difference between them, and both of them were hallway tested. But this difference between them is insignificant if there are dozens of thousands of people. ‘But what if we take millions of people? ’ — say guys in Google and start testing. This is an exception, as most companies don’t have such a number of users. However, companies with five users often start doing A/B testing and get upset when they don’t see any result.

— It seems like product-first companies mostly prefer qualitative than quantitative research. Is this true?

Qualitative methods are suitable to use in the early stages of product development. That’s why startups often use this. Qualitative methods allow being fast and changing something quickly. Also, they enable being in touch with your users and being aware of their needs.

The advantage of the qualitative method is that you don’t need to count anything. Also, there is more information about them on the Internet. What’s more, the barrier to entry is lower. But qualitative researches still makes sense in some cases.

The more a product grows, the more need to use quantitative research. For example, Facebook conducts dozens of A/B-tests per day — they have enough product users for this.

In case a startup starts doing A/B tests on users of a parent company, the result will be irrelevant. In most cases, the team misses the problem and solution stage and starts testing a product-market fit. The problem remains outstanding, and the team gets disappointed. Experienced researchers know about this.

— Tell me how the research process looks like in companies you’ve worked with?

This depends on the company’s size.

Large companies usually have a research department. It seems cool, but actually, it works slowly. Often all the departments conduct researches by themselves because it’s faster than passing this task to the research department.

In this case, the quality problem appears. Often researchers don’t know some product nuances. But there may be a compromise: in some companies, the research team consists of guys from the product management team.

In startups and fast-growing teams, product marketing managers, and product managers take this task. Guys share all the information they find, and the outcome PMM has found out will also see a product manager. Sometimes designers, analysts, or even developers may take part in conducting researches. This is awesome, and I think it’s a must in all the companies that want to conduct research.

Companies where large-scale research is needed. Such companies often build their own processes. For example, they train junior product managers to conduct an interview. At the same time, researchers develop research guides and monitor the research quality, analysts collect data, and so on. They pass the outcome they’ve got to the product development team and propose the possible solution.

— Can you remember some interesting case studies connected with research?

I remember the team that’s set a goal to bring a new product into the market and earn $100 000 within three months. During the first week, they’ve conducted about 30-40 interviews. This allowed us to develop hypotheses that brought over 50% of the total revenue. There was still room to improve, but we left this for a second iteration.

— Can you remember some failures?

I remember guys who conducted focus groups. And their questions totally differed from what they researched. After this project was finished, they claimed that all the researches are useless.

Another case. A research team was assigned a big task. They should have conducted customer development interviews. Just in a week, they delivered a result and withdraws. But when they showed a document with respondents’ answers, there were only three user interviews.

And one more. In one month, the research team has conducted over 100 interviews. They were exhausted. They delivered outcomes on an entirely different topic. In the very beginning, they misunderstood the task and held user conversations on the wrong theme. And results were completely different from what was required. This was upsetting.