Product managers work across multiple teams, constantly meeting with engineers and designers—leaving less than the ideal amount of time to talk with actual users. However, delaying to ask customers the right product questions during usability testing, customer interviews, and discovery conversations can create more problems for the entire team, wasted time, and unnecessary dollars spent.
Product teams innately care about user experience but sometimes don’t involve their actual customers until a project is in its final product development stages before launch.
You don’t need to be an expert researcher to unearth invaluable human insight from your customers. You must ask the right product questions throughout the development cycle to understand their needs better, so learning how to craft effective user research questions is a crucial skill.
Early-stage discovery
Before developing solutions, spend time understanding what the needs and frustrations your customers are experiencing might be. Implementing discovery interviews into your current process allows you to uncover what your target market likes or dislikes about a specific experience, product, or activity.
Discover needs and frustrations
In this stage of development, you’re looking to understand your customers better. Oftentimes, you won’t have an idea or an endpoint in mind, and that’s ok.
Ask your target market:
- What are the challenges you encounter when doing _____?
- How do you currently accomplish _____?
- What brands do you turn to in order to complete _____?
- What do you like about each brand?
Validate an idea
Once you’ve come closer to deciding a problem-solution, be certain your hunch resonates with your target market. Conducting a test or interview with your customers can reveal whether your concept is viable and has a strong product-market fit.
Ask your target market:
- What do you like about how you do it now?
- What don’t you like about how you do it now?
- Would something like _____ make your life easier?
- How much would you pay for something that _____?
Prototyping
Once you’ve started work on your solution, it’s a good idea to get customer feedback as soon as you have a wireframe. This will help you decide whether or not you’re on the right track. If you need to pivot, you won’t have wasted time and engineering resources in the development process. You’ll also be able to settle internal disputes with designers by letting users make your case for you.
Ask your target market:
- Looking around this prototype, what do you think it’s for?
- What would you expect to be able to do?
- What’s the first thing you’d do here?
- If you had a magic wand, how would you change this?
Compare between two options
During this phase, you’ll often have two (or more) working concepts that your users could test. A great way to uncover product insight is to determine which is better (or more viable) through a test that compares two options.
Ask your target market:
- Which of these two versions makes more sense to you?
- Is there a piece of one version you prefer over the other?
Development and pre-launch
So, you’ve reached a milestone. You’ve validated your product ideas, and you’re moving on to development. This is where interactive prototypes come in handy, as you can watch users explore your product as they naturally would.
Ask your target audience:
- What other jobs would you like to do here?
- Which features, if any, do you find the most/least useful?
- Does anything seem out of place?
Keep an eye out for what your users aren’t doing, too. If people aren't using one of your core features, that should raise a red flag!
Post-launch
Even after a new feature, product, or campaign has launched, keep monitoring to address challenges and continue evolving the experience to drive greater adoption or conversion. The questions you ask post-launch will help guide decisions on functionality or features you need to add or remove.
Ask your users:
- Why did you choose to do this over that?
- What would make doing _____ easier?
- What would you add or remove?
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