C Todd Lombardo
Product Research Rules

Video URL: https://www.mindtheproduct.com/product-research-rules-by-c-todd-lombardo/

Discussion: Issue #17

In this keynote from #mtpcon London, C. Todd Lombardo reminds us that as product managers we often make bad decisions. The key to minimising these, he says, is effective product research.

Key points:

All product managers make bad decisions To minimise the number we need to spend time doing effective product research – a combination of user research, market research and product analytics By getting more curious about your data and asking the right questions you can inspire action with insight To be really effective you’ll need to build habits around your organisation so this happens constantly

Our notes:

• “do you want to waste 45% of your resources? no? then do some fucking research!”

research types:

• user research: generative, descriptive, evaluative
• market research: exploratory, descriptive, causal, predictive
• product analytics: descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, prescriptive

It’s important to cover all of these, and do it in a habitual way.

There are different types of conversations you can have with people:

• Transactional – I see you have a coffee cup. We make cofee. Would you like to buy a coffee?
• Confirmational – Wouldn’t it be cool if you had a cold-brew cofee to fill that cup?

• Diagnostic – Tell me more about that cup. What do you usually drink out of it?

• Transactional > Confirmational »> Diagnostic
  • You will only confirm your own biases.
  • Just blindly following customer requests will result in creating products that noone really needs.
• Doing research over the phone is hard. Go see people use the product in real life to be effective.
• It is very important to share your research in a way that’s accessible. A long, complex research report is hard to digest.

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