Definition of a common approach to execution and measurement of customer discovery and ux research across hundreds of globally distributed product managers and teams
Challenge: Several hundred product managers executing customer and user research. Lack of consistency and quality leading to poor business cases.
Impact: Common language and approach to customer discovery across large global product management group. Digital approach to measure and target improvements in real time
Situation: A large global organization with hundreds of product managers each executing customer and user research in their own way with little consistency or quality. The challenge was to define and drive change in a large global organization with limited resources to achieve these targets. Some key aspects of the situation were
- Several hundred product managers across business and product lines globally distributed
- Each using their own approaches to customer discovery and research with mixed results
- Little visibility into the quality and quantity of customer/user interviews being done across the organization
- 1000s of interviews and insights lost forever as people would move jobs or leave the organization
Approach: A ground’s up effort in terms of definition of what the customer discovery or UX research approach needed to be and how to measure it effectively
- The first step was to define what our customer discovery process. I was careful to not just focus on tools and tactics but also train people on the inherent mindsets needed to do customer discovery well
- Training is all well and good – but customer interviews and UX research is something you only get good at by ‘doing’. So this is where I came up with a two fold path.
- A) Hands on just in time coaching on specific key/critical projects where the level of market uncertainty was very high
- B) A digital customer/user research management solution which I bootstrapped and product managed and got corporate funding to make a corporation wide standard.
- This platform allowed me to ensure that every single project followed a common approach to planning, execution of customer discovery using best practices
- The digital platform is now a corporate funded initiative – we continue to improve and add more value to this digital platform to enhance our customer discovery practice.
Impact: By design and launch of a fit for purpose digital platform to manage user/customer discovery I was able to achieve the following
- Make sure 1000s of customer and user interviews were captured in one common format using best practices across our $30B enterprise
- Use digital analytics to report on the practice of customer discovery. Real time visibility into how many interviews, the quality of the process used
- Use this analytics to prioritize projects which needed the most help and provide relevant coaching and direction (achieving timely completion of customer discovery sprints, with quality)
- Achieve a common measure by which to help Product managers measure their competence with customer discovery
