Get Actionable Customer Insights From Your Surveys: A Step-by-step Guide
Surveys are an invaluable tool for gathering information and insights from various sources. Whether you are conducting market research, customer feedback, or academic studies, the quality of your survey process is paramount to obtaining accurate results. However, the success of a survey depends on meticulous planning and execution. This article provides a comprehensive guide to conducting surveys effectively, regardless of their purpose. Let’s get started. Types of Surveys Based on Their Aims Surveys for Market Research: Market research surveys are conducted to understand consumer preferences, market trends, and competition. They help businesses make informed decisions and create strategies that cater to their target audience effectively. Customer Satisfaction Surveys: Customer satisfaction surveys aim to gauge how satisfied customers are with a product, service, or experience. They give businesses actionable customer insight and assist businesses in identifying areas for improvement and maintaining high customer retention rates. Academic Surveys: Academic surveys are prevalent in the world of research and education. Researchers use them to gather data and insights to support their hypotheses, studies, or theses. How to Structure Your Survey to Get Valuable Customer Insight This is a step-by-step guide to ensure you gather the right data effectively. We’ll also include a detailed demo example to illustrate each step of the process. Define The Survey Objectives: The first crucial step in the survey process is defining your survey objectives. This step may appear straightforward, but it’s the cornerstone of your entire survey. Without clear objectives, you risk creating a survey that lacks focus and might not deliver the data you need. Defining clear objectives sets the stage for a successful survey. It provides a sense of direction and ensures that the survey serves a purpose. Take for example a demo brand “TechVibe Inc.,” aiming to launch a new line of smartphones, your objectives could include understanding customer preferences, market trends, and the features that matter most to potential buyers. Having these objectives in place ensures your survey questions will align with your goals. If you skip this step or have vague objectives, your survey can become aimless and may not yield actionable customer insights. For example, if TechVibe Inc. neglects to define clear objectives, their survey might end up with random questions, including unrelated topics like food preferences e.t.c which you dont need. Selecting Your Target Audience: Once you’ve set your objectives, the next step is selecting your target audience. This step involves identifying the group of people who will participate in your survey. It is crucial to tailor your survey questions and approach to cater to their demographics and preferences. Choosing the right target audience ensures that your survey results will be relevant and useful. For the demo brand “TechVibe Inc.”, it’s essential to target tech-savvy individuals who are likely to buy their smartphones. This segmentation might include young adults, professionals, or students who use smartphones extensively. What this would look for TechVibe Inc. survey is tech-savvy individuals aged 18-40 who use smartphones for work, entertainment, and communication.” Be specific here, failing to identify your target audience can result in collecting irrelevant data. If TechVibe Inc. mistakenly targets elderly individuals who have no interest in smartphones, the survey results will be misleading and won’t assist in product development. Design Your Survey Questions: The heart of any survey lies in its questions. Crafting effective survey questions is an art that requires precision. Your questions should be clear, concise, and relevant to your objectives. Well-crafted questions ensure that respondents understand what you’re asking and can provide meaningful answers. For TechVibe Inc., asking questions like, “What features are most important to you in a smartphone?” and “How satisfied are you with your current smartphone?” directly align with their objective of understanding customer preferences. Always check for poorly worded or vague questions, they can lead to confusion and inaccurate responses. For instance, asking a vague question like, “Tell us about smartphones,” might yield responses too broad to be useful. Good Question: “On a scale of 1-5, how important are battery life, camera quality, and processing speed in a smartphone for your daily use?” Poor Question: “What do you think about smartphones?” Crafting the Survey Structure: The structure of your survey includes the order of questions and the types of questions you ask. This step ensures that your survey flows logically and engages respondents effectively. The survey structure also influences the respondent’s experience. For TechVibe Inc., starting with easy, non-threatening questions like, “What brand of smartphone do you currently use?” before diving into more complex ones about preferences helps build rapport and encourages participation. An illogical survey structure can lead to respondent frustration, survey abandonment, or inaccurate data. If you begin with complex technical questions, your respondents may feel overwhelmed and quit the survey. Good Structure: Start with demographic questions, followed by questions about current smartphone use and preferences. Then, dive into detailed questions about desired smartphone features. Poor Structure: Begin with technical specifications before asking basic questions. Choosing the Right Survey Distribution Method: The choice of survey distribution method is crucial in reaching your target audience effectively. It must align with your audience’s preferences and habits. Selecting the right distribution method ensures your survey reaches the intended participants efficiently. For TechVibe Inc., using an online survey platform or distributing surveys at tech-related events aligns with their tech-savvy target audience. Using an inappropriate distribution method can result in low response rates and a skewed sample giving little to know unique customer insight. If TechVibe Inc. decides to distribute paper surveys in a digital-first environment, they may struggle to collect sufficient data. Collecting Data: Once you’ve successfully designed your survey and distributed it to your target audience, the next crucial step is collecting the data. This step involves efficiently gathering and managing the responses from your survey participants. Collecting data is the core of any survey, and it’s essential for the success of your research. Inefficient data collection can lead to lost or messy data, making it challenging to draw meaningful conclusions. For instance, if you fail
From Idea to Reality: The Role of a Product Vision in Product Development
Vision starts with knowing your customers and what they need. You have to deeply understand their challenges and how your product will solve them. A product vision will serve as a guide for the stakeholders, as it will remind them of the general direction the product should be taking, and the common objectives within the team. A product’s development and management involve time, perseverance, effort, and a distinct product vision. In simple terms, stakeholders must be persuaded by the product vision that your development strategy is in line with business objectives and is best for your target market. What is a Product Vision? A product vision also known as a product vision statement is a long-term vision of the product, or what the product will look like in the future. It outlines a product’s strategy and objectives so that stakeholders understand how they should proceed. It also describes the future state of the product as well as the issues or goals it seeks to address. Your product vision sheds light on the motivation for the development of the product and how it meets consumer needs in a way that benefits the company. They also serve as a product manager’s compass for maintaining communication with all relevant parties. As they proceed through the development process, this enables the product team to maintain organization. It also helps the users learn about and connect with a particular product. Ultimately, product vision statements act as benchmarks for the creation of the product. In other words, you begin with a high-level vision statement, then translate that vision into a strategic guide and action plan—the product roadmap. Why is a Product Vision Important? Product vision statements are crucial for businesses for a number of reasons, both for the sake of the customers and stakeholders. To begin with, individuals involved in creating the product and realizing the future state described by the product owner want a clear and cogent development roadmap. A product vision can be compared to a company’s compass in this way. This is so because product vision statements give a lot of important background information about a product, including its objectives, the motivations for its conception, the benefits it aims to offer consumers or users, and the desired future state of a product. All of this provides the stakeholders with a shared goal for their work to change the product’s current state. Additionally, one of the few things that may convey a significant amount of information about your business and product in the fewest possible words is a product vision statement. A product vision can quickly respond to customers who may have accidentally discovered your product and are wondering what it is or what it is intended to accomplish. What makes a great product vision? Define the motivation behind the product It’s great to have an idea for a product but it doesn’t end there. Defining the reason why this product is necessary will help shape the development process. Ask yourself why you are excited to work on the product, why you care about it, what positive change the product should bring about, and how it will shape the future. This provides a great deal of context and information to both customers and stakeholders and can be very useful in determining the best course for further product development and use. Product vision should align with company vision The majority of the time, your product vision will be different from your company vision, which is a crucial concept to comprehend. However, the company’s overarching vision must be complemented by the product visions. This is required because corporate visions and goals can be complex. If the corporate vision is to be realized, it will be accomplished through the company’s products, which are defined by its product visions. As a result, for a company’s corporate vision to be realized, its product visions must be aligned with it. Keep your customers and end users in mind Your customers are the reason for your product, therefore, the product vision must be created with the needs of your target audience and end users in mind. Distinguish between product vision and product strategy Although they are closely related, product vision and product strategy are different. Your vision of the product should not be a plan that demonstrates how to reach your goal. Instead, the product vision and the product strategy, the path toward the goal, should be kept separate. This allows your strategy to be modified while remaining grounded in your vision. Where you want your product to be should be the main focus of your vision. The shorter, the better Your vision should be short and straight to the point so it’s easy for your team and stakeholders to understand. It will most likely be difficult to condense all of the words you want to use in the product vision, but short and sweet usually works better with customers. Furthermore, people are more likely to remember something that is only a sentence long rather than a lengthy paragraph. E.g Insight7’s product vision is “to help businesses build more successful products and services.” Make it inspiring Customers should be motivated to purchase your product or service when they read your product vision. A vision centered on generating value and benefitting others ultimately provides a particularly deep motivation and long-lasting inspiration. A great vision statement should be inspirational for both stakeholders and customers. It must be compelling enough for stakeholders to rally behind, as well as motivate customers to support it. It should be achievable and attainable Your product vision should represent a view of the future that your team believes in and is confident you can achieve. Great product visions are always ambitious, even remarkably so. However, they’re still blueprints and roadmaps stakeholders are using to develop a product, so they must be attainable. Differentiation Your vision should explain why your product is different from your competitors’. It is critical to examine the competition and understand why your product’s vision
AI in Product Discovery: 3 predictions to materialize by 2023
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning in product discovery are a major transition many product development professionals believe will become widely adopted for discovery and delivery in the upcoming year. With AI’s powerful data capabilities transforming the operations and capabilities of many companies, the same is expected in the product world. In 2022, we saw the widespread use and success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT which reiterated AI capabilities and applications to every industry. In 2023, it is expected that every industry, with a focus on product discovery, will seek to leverage the potential of AI to unlock new capabilities. Here are 3 AI predictions in product discovery that will become a reality sooner than you think. Automate customer research interview analysis There are currently a lot of product discovery tools that help data scientists and UX researchers carry out customer research interview analysis and generate insights. However, leveraging the power of AI, it is safe to say that this process will be fully automated by AI-powered tools and transform the product discovery process for product teams. One of such AI-powered product discovery tools is Insight7. One major challenge of UX researchers is the amount of time spent on transcribing customer research interviews and then analyzing data from the interviews to generate valuable insights. With the power of AI, 2023 will see the emergence of a fully automated customer research process, saving so much time and money. AI will help product managers automate more of the low-level tasks and allow them to focus more on creative and strategic work. Increase in synthetic data in usability testing Synthetic data – data artificially generated by a computer simulation – will generally grow exponentially in 2023. In product discovery, synthetic data will be used increasingly especially in usability testing for products. This is because synthetic data offers a more cost-effective and efficient avenue to collect data for more intelligent AI. Usability testing is a technique used in user-centered interaction to evaluate a product by testing it on users. It gives direct input on how real users use the product. Usability testing is necessary for the success of a viable end product. A functioning software that creates confusion among its users will not last, hence the need for usability testing. It measures the ease of use of a device while also focusing on measuring the product’s capacity to meet its intended purpose. Usability testing is a way to see how easy it is to use something by testing it with real users. Users are asked to complete tasks while they are being observed by a researcher to see where potential problems may be encountered. However, the mind blowing ability of Al to process data makes it a powerful asset for any form of usability testing as it also eliminates biased approaches in A/B testing. Another strength of AI over humans in usability testing is its ability to analyze thousands of different design variations while generating alternatives. AI replacing UX researchers Well, about this point I guess we’ll all wait to see this play out. It’s no news that Artificial Intelligence is taking the world by storm. AI-powered tools are now a part of our everyday lives and may be gradually edging humans out of their jobs as it allows us to deliver better results faster, more easily and with fewer resources. UX and qualitative research at large are no strangers to this technological revolution. In recent years, many of the most time-consuming steps once performed manually are being optimized by AI, saving UX researchers countless hours of repetitive and somewhat boring tasks. Based on their analysis of over 200,000 jobs in 29 countries, PwC estimates that up to 30% of jobs could be automated by the mid-2030s. However, the employment outlook for humans isn’t necessarily as bleak as it sounds. The World Economic Forum predicts that, while AI will take some jobs away from humans, it will also create 97 million new jobs by 2025. AI isn’t a potential threat to the UX researcher’s livelihood. Rather, it can be a powerful tool that UX researchers can leverage to generate valuable insights to create top-notch user experiences. Even with these statistics, some people still opine that AI would be a threat to UX researchers’ jobs. These are just a few of the pointers indicating a significant takeover by AI in product discovery this year. Here’s a bonus point: Rise of non tech folks building products with AI Accessibility and ease of use of AI would birth many products built by non certified product teams. With AI such as the ChatGPT, individuals can just have an idea and ask the AI to develop it and even write codes. With minimal knowledge of product design and development, anybody can now build a product or at least, make an attempt to do so. Would it be a valuable or useful product? In my opinion, highly unlikely. However, get ready to witness an AI takeover in product development this year as many experiments would be done. We’ll keep tabs on the trends through the year and watch these predictions play out.
Product Owner vs. Product Manager: What really is the difference?
A product manager and a product owner are two very important roles in the development of a product. They are two roles that are often associated with the development and management of a product within an organization. Some organizations may wonder whether it is necessary to employ both a product manager and a product owner, seeing that their roles are interrelated. But are they really the same? While they may seem quite similar at the surface level and have some overlapping responsibilities, there are however some significant differences between the two roles that are important to understand. Product managers are responsible for the overall strategy and vision for a product. They work closely with cross-functional teams to ensure that the product aligns with the company’s overall goals and objectives. They are also responsible for defining the product roadmap and ensuring that the development team is on track to meet the product’s goals and deadlines. On the other hand, product owners are focused on the day-to-day management of the product. They are responsible for prioritizing and organizing the development team’s work, as well as communicating with stakeholders to ensure that the product meets their needs and expectations. They are also responsible for making decisions about which features and capabilities to include in the product, based on input from the development team, customers, and other stakeholders. The roles and responsibilities of the product owner include what features would be a part of the product release. The product owner defines user stories based on customer requirements and prioritizes them for the development team. One key difference between product managers and product owners is that product managers have a more strategic role, while product owners are more focused on the tactical execution of the product. Product managers are responsible for defining the overall direction and vision for the product, while product owners are responsible for ensuring that the development team can execute and deliver on that vision in a way that meets the needs of stakeholders and customers. They are responsible for the product backlog, which is a prioritized list of all the features and functions that a product should have. The product owner is responsible for maintaining the backlog and prioritizing items on it based on the needs of the business and the development team. They work closely with the development team to ensure that the most important items are being worked on first. Read also: Harnessing Customer Interviews to Build the Right Product Another key difference is that product managers often have a broader scope of responsibility than product owners. Product managers are typically responsible for the entire product lifecycle, from concept to launch and beyond, while product owners are typically focused on the development and release of a specific product or product feature. The product manager is more focused on the big picture and the long-term strategy for the product, while the product owner is more focused on the day-to-day details and making sure that the development team has everything they need to be successful. Overall, the product manager decides what products to build next, and the product owner helps the development team to build the products.
Harnessing Customer Interviews to Build the Right Product
Product discovery undoubtedly is the customer-centric approach to determining whether or not a product or feature should be developed. However, how can these decisions be made? Through continuous discovery. One of the most important aspects of continuous discovery is customer research, and customer interviews are the bedrock of that. To have a good grasp of what your customers really want, you have to engage with them frequently. To some product teams, customer interviews are more or less opening up a Pandora’s box with a litany of more problems than can be handled. This is because customer interviews can possibly shed so much light on the loopholes in your product, and let’s be honest, nobody wants their months of hard work and time invested in making something they assumed would be useful, to be thrashed. But in reality, there’s no better way to build good products than to ask the people the product is built for, the exact things they want. This helps you identify their pain points and condition your solution -your product- to meet those needs. Read also : 7 product discovery books that teach you everything you should know. Thinking of a better way to make conducting customer interviews more productive and less exhausting? Here are some pointers you may want to employ in your next one. 1. Focus on more listening than talking You are trying to know more about your customers, their interests, their lifestyle, and how they interact with your product. Resist the temptation to turn it into a pitch or demo meeting. Keep it as conversational as possible and ask the right questions. Try using more good open-ended questions with fewer assumptions than close-ended typical yes-no questions. This allows the interviewee to be as detailed in their feedback as possible. Also, focus on more questions that allow you validate the problem. 2. Take notes even while you record the interviews (and afterward). Many times, valid points or insights can be forgotten after the interview even though you recorded the process. Jot down striking points while the interview is ongoing. Also, go back over interview recordings to get key insights or better still, leverage the power of AI transcription and analyzing tools. Read Also: The Power of User Interviews in Building Successful Products 3. Recommend probable solutions Finally, make a couple of recommendations on what you think the team should change about the product or overall customer journey as a result of the interviews. Connect the recommendations to the summary. Don’t make recommendations that are disconnected from the key insights you highlighted in the summary. If it’s helpful, create a table that highlights the key insights and puts 1-2 recommendations right next to each insight. Lastly, prioritize. Don’t list every tweak that needs to be made – choose the hard-hitting top 2-3 that would really make the most impact on the product.
Product Discovery Basics For Building Better Products
What is product discovery? Product discovery is the process by which product teams learn about a problem and opportunity space in which they are trying to create a solution for. The goal of product discovery is to generate a shared understanding within the team about the problem and potential solutions. This understanding is then used to inform the product roadmap and help prioritize product features. Why is product discovery important? Product discovery reduces the time to value of a product or feature as it helps product teams focus on the right problems and build the right solutions. Without a good understanding of the problem and opportunity space, it is easy for teams to build features that no one wants. Who is responsible for product discovery? Product discovery is typically run by a trifecta or triad including the product manager, product designer and engineer. In some cases it could also involved a user research and data scientist who bring in qualitative and quantitative insights and perspectives to the discovery process What are the steps involved in product discovery? Product discovery emerged in the early 2000s as a better way for product teams to build compared to the then method of lengthy, requirements-steeped product development process. What makes for good product discovery is the collaboration with users or customers through the conceptualisation process. The main steps involved in product discovery are: 1. Understand the problem 2. Define the problem 3. Ideate potential solutions 4. Iterate and validate solutions Read more about Essential Customer Discovery Process for B2B Startups What are the techniques used in product discovery? There are several tactics and frameworks associated with product discovery today. There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to tools but popular ones used in product discovery process include: Customer interviews: involves asking questions from customers or users via offline and offline communication to understand their needs, pain points and desires. User story maps: Help teams to visualize the user flow and track progress on features Journey maps: Help teams to understand the user experience and identify areas for improvement User or usability testing: allows product teams to assess whether the proposed solution actually solves Prototyping: prototypes are used to communicate and validate proposed solutions with users. They can be used to test different user flows and understand how users interact with the proposed solution. A/B tests: A/B tests are used to quickly validate whether a solution actually solves the problem it was created to solve. Customer journey mapping: is a technique used to define and organize product features. It involves creating a map of the user journey, which helps to identify areas where the product could be improved. Assumption tests: is used to validate assumptions about the product and its features. This usually involves conducting user research and testing the product with real users. Opportunity solution trees: This technique involves creating a tree-like diagram of the potential solutions for a problem, which can help to identify the best course of action. Ethnographic studies: are used to understand the behavior of users. This usually involves observing users in their natural environment and conducting interviews. Jobs to be done: is a technique used in product discovery to help organize product features based on the users goals or objectives. This technique involves understanding the user’s needs and wants, and then designing the product accordingly. Why is user research important during product discovery User research is important during product discovery as it allows product teams to validate their assumptions about the product and its features. This usually involves conducting user research and testing the product with real users. User research can take many forms but some common ones include interviews, surveys, focus groups, usability testing and A/B testing. User research is important as it provides insights into how users interact with the product and what their needs and pain points are. Read more about The Power of User Interviews in Building Successful Products Why is it important to do product discovery continuously? Product discovery should be seen as a continuous process, rather than something that is only done at the beginning of a product development cycle. This is because the problem and opportunity space is constantly changing and product teams need to be agile in their approach in order to build the right solutions. Continuous product discovery also allows product teams to validate their assumptions and learnings from previous discovery processes to build better products.
