Introducing Product Insight: fast feedback that drives confident product decisions

By Michael Mace | March 14, 2019
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Introducing Product Insight: fast feedback that drives confident product decisions

Product managers play a critical role in the success of modern corporations. They balance business priorities, customer needs, and technical issues in the face of incredibly tight deadlines.

Making this challenge even tougher, the customer insight tools used by product managers haven’t kept pace with their decision-making needs. Many product teams have as little as a day to make critical decisions on features. Although analytics help, they can’t explain what customers are thinking, let alone what they need. Traditional market research takes far too long, and often product teams don’t have any formal research support anyway.

In this situation, many product teams rely on hunches and hope for the best. More than half of product managers say they frequently have to guess how customers will react to a new feature, two-thirds say they wish they had more data to support decisions, and about three-quarters say their analytics sometimes show customer behavior they can’t explain.

This creates huge risks for companies. A single bad decision can lead to wasted time, blown budgets, and the outright failure of products.

Starting today, product teams have a better way to make decisions. We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve launched a human insight solution tailor-made for the unique needs of product teams—Product Insight.

Andy MacMillan, UserTesting’s CEO underscores the value of Product Insight for product teams,

This is the product I wished for when I was a product manager. A typical PM is bombarded with data and advice but starved for insight on how average users think and react. Product Insight gives you accurate user feedback in-the-moment, far faster than traditional market research. You’ll never have to guess how your users will react again.

Sachin Rekhi, Founder and CEO of Notejoy and a prominent product management commentator, shared the importance of rapid customer feedback to creating great products:

Continuous customer feedback is absolutely essential to delivering product experiences that delight customers, yet product teams often struggle to get in front of customers as often as they should. UserTesting's Product Insight now offers product managers one of the fastest paths to critical customer insights without the burdens of traditional user testing.

How Product Insight helps product teams

Product Insight empowers anyone on a product team to make high-confidence decisions based on customer input, without delaying the development process. It’s designed for people who have no research expertise—pre-defined tests can be launched in moments, and pre-formatted reports identify the key results immediately, without the need to watch hours of video.

The features of Product Insight are optimized to solve the most common problems of product teams, at every stage of development:

Product Insight is built around two breakthrough features:

  • Quick Answers: Preformatted tests, designed by research professionals, collect customer feedback to solve common product problems. Results are usually available within a few hours.
  • Live Conversation: In less than a day, recruit and schedule live video interviews with target customers. The interviews are automatically recorded.

Quick Answers

Quick Answers target six key questions product teams regularly ask in the product development cycle. Our expert team of researchers crafted preformatted tests designed to give product teams quick answers to their most common questions.

Quick Answer tests enable teams to:

  • Discover customer needs and frustrations
  • Validate a product idea
  • Test a sketch or prototype
  • Test website usability
  • Prioritize between two features or other options
  • Compare two websites (great for competitive studies)

Quick Answer tests enable teams to:

Each Quick Answer test was carefully designed to give product teams the insight they need with minimal time and effort. Just fill in a few blanks, choose your target audience, and you’ll have answers to your most pressing product questions in a couple of hours.

Once a test is completed, the results are easy to digest, right from your dashboard—you get an easy to scan summary of the results and an automatically generated video highlight reel of the key moments from the test.

You can also easily dig deeper to watch key segments from each test, identifying exactly why customers responded the way they did. No research expertise is needed, and there’s no need to watch hours of test video.

Quick Answer tests enable teams to:

Live Conversation

Discovery interviews are critical to modern product development, but the process of recruiting and scheduling them can be a logistical nightmare. Live Conversation dramatically changes that by automating the entire process. You can recruit and schedule interviews with your target customers around the nation in less than a day. In the interviews, you can share screens and see each other, and everything is automatically recorded and delivered to your dashboard. You can easily extract video highlights and share them with your team to explain decisions and share insights.

Live Conversation

Designed for non-researchers

Product Insight makes it easy for non-researchers to collect human insights. It includes extensive built-in help, onboarding, and free chat access to research professionals. Companies can also access UserTesting’s extensive professional services team if they have specialized needs.

Product Insight in action

Product Insight is based on UserTesting’s decade of experience in human insight testing, as well as deep engagement with many of the world’s best product teams. We’ve been working with Product Managers at more than 40 companies as part of the beta for Product Insight. We’ve heard great feedback from those customers on the experience and continue to improve the offering based on those learnings.

One of the best ways to understand the power of Product Insight is to see it in action. Watch the video below to get a sample of how it works.

Product Insight empowers every employee to get customer insight

Product Insight was built on top of Insight Core, the powerful foundation of UserTesting’s industry-leading Human Insight Platform. The platform enables companies to quickly engage their target customers, identify insights, and share learnings throughout the corporation, all at the speed of modern business. With Product Insight, product teams can reduce guesswork and rework, get to market faster, and deliver products customers love on the first release.

Research teams can scale routine customer research throughout the organization with confidence, knowing that Product Insight was carefully designed to protect against research mistakes. This frees research pros to focus on the most complex and generative projects, increasing their efficiency and business impact.

Want to learn more?

You can learn more about Product Insight here and register for our upcoming webinar, How to make great products in real time using fast customer feedback.

To learn how UserTesting can help you understand your customers through on-demand human insight, contact us here.

Webinar

Listen to our on-demand webinar to learn practical examples for gathering fast feedback and see Product Insight in action.

About the author(s)
Michael Mace

Michael Mace is the VP of Market Strategy at UserTesting and a veteran of over 25 years in the tech industry. He's held marketing and strategy roles at Apple and Palm, co-founded two startups, and has consulted for many tech industry companies.