How to start your MVP, with User Research

How to start your MVP, with User Research: If you're in a role that involves a new product launch a 'birth' or rather a 'hot potato' a product that has already been built, you're still going to need user research.

(Thanks to Lizzy Morris for these terms @ScrumAlliance)

For beginners in the industry or even as a refresher to those experienced, user research is the foundation of finding out what they want, may need, and what their pain points are.

I find it useful to create as part of my role and environment a hypothesis-driven development approach to my product pipeline. This is a how-to-guide of how I would understand my users, the end-users, and the different types of customers and their touchpoints with my product.

In my experience, sometimes, at more traditional organizations, it's often quite hard to push on agile practices, within legacy structures, there is bureaucracy where lots of different layers of approvals, and blurred lines of ownership or accountability can be foggy.

If you have walked into an organization where dysfunctional is a normal way of work, (yes they are out there and yes we can get stuck, no matter how good we are), approaching it with a 'change management hat' may help you avoid frustration. (It's helped me!)

Sometimes, we are faced with leaders, that are experts in their field, with more than 25 years in the game and in their industry. The king of the castle, however in the face of the changing landscape of technology, speed of competitiveness, it's a danger to ever feel comfortable in the driver's seat and exclaim and shout you know your customers when customers change their behavior rapidly, I like to think that yesterday's customers are not today's.

So, proceed with caution (remember to not step on toes, if it will cost you your job) and make sure you do a few change management things to get buy in early on with your stakeholders, a good start can be 'Introducing Agile to the organization' workshops, or if you can just jump straight into a design-thinking workshop, do it.

So, for those of you that want to take home a paycheck every month and yet still need to move fast, I relentlessly try every day to change the mindset, in small steps, and sometimes if the organization welcomes it, bigger leaps.

Then here's a way to start, gaining momentum in User research, create a hypothesis, imagine first then test.

Try the below guideline only if, you are in the following scenarios;

Scenario a) You're at an organization where your boss, believes they know everything that they need to know about the customer. (proceed with caution)

Scenario b) You're bootstrapping your business, you don't have a lot of resources or investment and need to just get stuff done

(Warning: businesses that don't talk to customers or humans will often more or less, fail, so proceed with caution)

Please note: if your management team is not responsive to the initiative, continue with caution, until you are able to build rapport, respect, and influence, don't go guns blazing, you might just be on your way out to the exit sooner than later

Congratulations you are the product owner of 'FindLocal', you have spoken to your founders and they have explained the strategy and mission of what they want to build and why.

'As Jason the CEO of 'FindLocal' I want to innovate my business model from Catalogue to Online, in niche markets, by launching my own digital products that helps my customers, to find what they need and compare between offers easily, I want to focus on the Florida region and offer Swimming pools as my first vertical, I want to be the price comparison site for these types of products and many more that are currently fragmented and that users don't have a great experience in yelp or review sites'

Strategy objective: Jason wants to diversify the revenue stream from Catalogue Distribution and Printing to Online.

After meeting with Jason the CEO, as a product owner, the first thing you're going to do in your new job is to create a positioning statement to understand the business and its goals.

1. Creating your Position Statement

Create your positioning statement, this is a statement that introduces the company and the product you're working on, Jason has disclosed that the product is called "SwimLane". Framework

[Target Customer] who [opportunity / need / wants], the [product name] is a [description] that [benefits], unlike [competitor/s], our product [provide description of the key differences points]

Examples

Positioning Statement for 'End Users' (Business to Consumers)

SwimLane provides families in Florida the opportunity to find & compare swimming pools and prices all in one platform so that customers are able to get multiple quotes in real-time from professional swimming pool companies. Unlike our competitors, we offer our customers several different payment options, for pay as you go, lay-away, and loans to afford their dream pool.

Positioning Statement for 'Users' (Business to Business)

SwimLane provides construction companies all over America, to access customers and generate leads for families that want to find & compare swimming pools and prices in one platform. Unlike traditional listings & review platforms online, we help you with a variety of business tools to capture leads, quote your customers easily and provide payment options with major banks, so you're business is able to be found by qualified homeowners looking to buy and build a swimming pool.

Jason the CEO at Swimlane, doen't believe that you should spend time on doing customer interviews and user research.. he says 'We don't have any customers, this is a totally. new product'

Start exploring your hypothesis by creating and visualizing the persona.

2. Visualize your persona

Put a face to a name, I often find it really helps to visualize my perfect customer, I envision what the user(s) would look like and classified them into job titles to help me imagine and understand who they are and what they do.

Meet Tim O'Shea, he is the founder of the business and later you'll meet Toby Price a new homeowner, both personas have different functions, thoughts, feelings, emotions, and goals. So brainstorm away, who is your ideal customer?

3. Setup Interviews with Profiles or Conduct Desk Research

Like any research, you're going to find these types of users in your user base, if you're working on a new product, desk research helps before approaching and conducting a focus group. A little tip, I find Social media is a great place to find profiles of your ideal user groups.

If you have a budget for your project, consider outsourcing it, a few great companies to work with are; Morphosis Apps who can help lead and facilitate your user research project. Another alternative is to use self-service platforms such as Userbrain, Respondent, User Interviews and UserZoom.

4. Creating Tim's story

Begin with the persona's demographics, age, location, and a description of Tims's pain point/problems statement. Imagine this if you have to or collect the data from your user research by creating your first Stakeholder interview, in the worst case of scenarios (always avoid if you can) craft this assumption persona out internally by verifying anyone you can get your hands on (hallways, friends, family, colleagues, next-door neighbours) It's important to try to not create implicit bias when you do your desk research, so talk to humans that are not in your company.

Tim's Story

"Tim is a founder of a swimming pool company, he has been in business for 20 years building swimming pools across Florida, USA. Tim's business has been in a decline of some time, due to the pandemic he had mostly relied on print advertising, word of mouth and yelp, he has a website but it has not been up-to-date. Tim needs more new business and lead generation to be able to keep his business running"

5. Find Tim's Focus

Start zooming into what is important stuff, highlight the stuff that Tim's is saying that you think is going to be important.

Product:

Swimming pool construction

Location: Florida, USA

Pain Point:

Marketing & Advertising isn't generating new business & leads

The revenue decline in Pandemic

Goal:

Higher volume of Lead Generation, to convert and increase the revenue of the new business

6. Define Tim's Customer

We're going to do the exact same exercise, however, this time, let's try with finding out information of who is Tim's customers are and what their pain points might be.

"Toby is married and has a 4-year-old son, he is expecting a second child on the way, he has just bought a new home in Fleming Island, Florida, after moving from an apartment in downtown, Toby works as a systems architect at a firm, he is looking for an 8ft swimming pool with a gated area to keep his family safe in his 3-bedroom property, he is having a hard time comparing pool prices and wants to make a decision based on quality, price, value, and warranties"

Product:

8ft' Swimming pool construction

Location: Fleming Island, Florida, USA

Pain Point:

Unable to make a decision, feels difficulty in researching pools.

Goal:

Wants to be able to easily see a list to compare pool options

Buy an 8 ft swimming pool with quality, good value, and a warranty

Wants to feel safe

7. Defining the problem

So it's time to formulate the idea into a business model canvas, let's explore how we can brainstorm this, ask questions, remember everything can be validated with data, real users, and a product.

Key Assumption

"Tim wants to generate leads, at a high level what kind of service or product should we provide Tim and what type of product does Toby need to be able to compare pool prices and buy a swimming pool?"

8. Create your Business model canvas to find your value propositions!

The Business model canvas provides a quick draft of all the areas you need to explore the strategy and develop an MVP.

Remember an MVP must perform, if the goal is transactions, you will need a payment gateway or a way to pay, if the goal is traffic and leads, you will need a contact form and a way to generate traffic. Download the official business model canvas for free here. Here is my example of starting the business model canvas, if the teams that you are working with are new to the Business model canvas, use this canvas as a way to collaborate together, which will help you with agreement and commitment to the initiative. If they are not receptive, that's a totally different problem altogether and I will in a later post and provide strategies on how I have influenced my technical or founding teams.

9. Design your solution for your product by breaking down your first EPIC and its stories

For those of you new to creating Epics, I like to think that an epic is a really high-level description of your user's problem, it's a large but concise explanation of the issue the user is facing and it can be broken down into child user stories or a series of stories.

So for Tim's Swimlane's product, we can brainstorm the type of initiatives we could hypothesize to draw up a bit of a charter to the project.

We want to explore what are the personas, jobst-to-be-done, the demand and value analysis probably go into usability hypothesis and then finally to finish functional hypothesis.

(I will create a separate how-to on go-to-market, disruption, and innovating later down the track, but stay with me here if you are new to the world of UX and product development)

An example of an EPIC

'As Tim the CEO of Swimlane, I want my customers to know that I have the lowest price and the best quality for swimming pools in the Florida region so that I can increase my leads and win new business online.'

Strategy objective: Address the customer's pain point.

What are you hearing that Tim wants?

'As Tim the CEO of Swimlane, I want to offer quotations to customers online, when they ask for it and provide them with a variety of different ways to pay, so they are able to make a decision without further objections'

Strategy objective: Leverage a niche industry to approach partnerships with big banks, offer on-the-spot, easy to use and real-time tools to create quotes.

'As Tim the CEO of Swimlane, I want to spend my advertising dollars more effectively online, so that I can generate qualified leads without wasting money

Strategy objective: Invest in qualified advertising products, to decrease ad-spend YoY

It's traditionally not part of the Epic to address your strategic objective as I did above, I find it meaningful to keep things in check and it helps me train my muscles of strategic thinking so that I can create value for the organization I work with.

The Company Strategy provides context to the Business objectives which then, help me Define Sprint goals and the key metrics to be successful in my role as a product owner. This way when I talk to my engineering team and my developers, they understand why we are doing things and why they are important and what value will the product creation for the company.

Ask questions about what product success looks like?

'What type of numbers do I need to show so that I understand that my product is successful'

Hard numbers, don't lie, so to measure success (even early ones), establish what type of metrics you need to measure in order to be successful with the product;

Is it the amount of money your product makes by its users, is what numbers are important, will it be traffic, is it the time they spend, where they are dropping out, did they complete a journey of signing up to your service and how many purchases did you get from the people that click to buy or enquire?

When you don't have a clear set of metrics, to measure your product, you're not going to be able to clearly go from stage 1 to stage 2, sometimes the gut works, you have a wonderful idea, everyone wants it, that's what they say, and you're confident that you know it will succeed, it's ok to be positive and optimistic, my advice is to keep your head and heart in check with clear and precise goals and don't be afraid to walk in that door and ask management what their goals are to then circle back round and apply it to the product.

No matter what industry/product I have been working on, every action a user takes is either a buying response or a non-buying response.

10. Design a storyboard

When you have written your EPIC story, create the storyboard this helps with identifying the overall most important steps or milestones that need to happen for your perfect

'Happy Path'.

Key takeaways: Always be asking...

'What does my customer need to do today, to get what they want and purchase tomorrow?

The key to a successful product is getting clarity, creating goals to measure success, and launching a product that addresses the immediate need of the customers today and those of tomorrow.

These 10 steps may seem quite comprehensive and take more time than just going with it when I practiced it, it helps me create a clearer picture and provided structured experiments to formulate my hypothesis, it has also helped me get alignment from business to my team and encourage an agile-friendly workplace with incorporating the hypothesis-driven design.

Thanks for reading, I'm going to be writing over these few months and try to get everything I have learned in this blog so stay tuned and visit at a future date for new stories on Product Development and Venture building.