Raquel is a UX Lead at Shopify with over 10 years of experience. At UXDX Amsterdam, she focused on the importance that research and monitoring plays on speeding products to market, and how they can help you drive your product development.
Better is a subjective value, not a goal. It is important to create a set of shared values that guides product development. Better should define the outcome
Hi, Iโm Raquel and The next 20min iโm going to focus on the importance that research and monitoring play on speeding products to market, and how they can help you drive your product development.
So letโs roll.
Weโre all aiming to be better right, thatโs what we do, we say we want to do.
It means nothing.
Better isnโt a goal, itโs a subjective value. And is a trap we constantly put ourselves in.
Think about the many people that at some point in time will make decisions about and related with your product: researchers, engineers, sales, support, marketingโฆ how can we even do anything better based on subjective values?
You need to clarify this to
create alignment, define purpose and a set of shared values that will guide your product development
Better products deliver a benefit to both the user and the company that produces them.
You will become better by focusing on these two elements.
So, its not even about you and what you want to make better. Itโs about what users define as better and, regardless of being a user centric company, how that better aligns with the vision of your company to grow, and the plan to grow.
You need to define better before you make any product related decisionโ. Or will just be impossible to know if you are being successful.
Cause you donโt know what you are doing, the team doesnโt know what to focus on, nor you will know how to evaluate your product and if โwhatever that better isโ is actually happening.
You need to shape better in the form of the outcomes you want to enable to your user.
With the Outcomes you can define metrics, your KPIS, your performance indicators.
Because you know this it will be easy for you to learn whether you are actually succeeding and making customers happy.
You know exactly with data to look into to know to validate your productโs success.
Success will happen through a constant loop between research and monitoring.
Will help shape your hypothesis, give you the most relevant metrics by which we will be able to verify success.
Will define the โtruesโ and โfalsesโ that will guide you through product development.
Constant Monitoring will let you know how well your product is doing, and if you are on the right track. Collects the evidence you need to keep growing the product.
It sounds simple right? We do this and we can surely rock the moon.
You have a goal you know the process: youโre ready to win the market, right? No!
Process doesnโt define success either. Checklists donโt mean effectiveness.
The wrong exercises and tools can bias the product development. Theyโre often roadblocks and lead to dead ends.
You can collect tones and tones of data, but so what?
We have to fix that process by adding context.
To enhance your process, speed your product to market, and be successful you need context.
Because it defines the boundaries for your actions.
It frames effectiveness.
With context you build a framework for and of shared knowledge.
Having Everyone on the same page means a shared focus and everyone working towards the same goal. It makes possible a clear common purpose
Collaborative platform that allows you to quickly identify next steps, and learn which problems to have eyes on and can potentially surfacing
Context is power. โCause it puts you in control of time. And time is essential to disruptive products.
Having all the participants on board from moment 1 means you are working towards the urgency of the digital world. You will waste way less time โcauseโฆ.
(go through multiple points in slide)
Less time is speed to market.
A market that you are more likely to be fit for because together the team has defined the purpose of the research, of what we need you learn more about, uncover.
Why (qualitative): tells you how to solve it, opens opportunities for exploration, reveals latent needs, etc.
What (quantitative): validates a problem you may already be aware of, noticed, wanted to solve
So be intentional in every step along the way, with every effort.
Context makes possible a highly successful hypothesis.
Cause it includes what the team believed to be true (about the user and problem), and quantifiable ways to verify that assumption.
You will have them, all the time.
Speeding products to market means accepting that you wont be able to test and back up every single decision.
If you are extremely rigorous, nothing would ever get done.
So you take risks. Thats what assumptions are: the possibility of failure.
So what ?That needs to be built into your plan like everything else is.
To prevent failure & minimize risk you need to break down those assumptions.
(explain graph)
The safe area is also extremely important
Little failures are great opportunities for you to learn more and gather new insights.
So start here!
identify the outcomes that you can build at very low cost - may this be time, or money, etc - that allow the team to learn the most.
Embrace failure, donโt try to be perfect.
Progress is not measured by the amount of work done, but how much one has learned.
The more we understand the challenges and struggles of our users, how our product fails a user, the more we can work to eliminate the friction points, improve the product, and grow your company by making a lovable product.
And this is the value of research: to allow you to build for learning, to learn fast.
So be intentional: know what you want to learn, so you can be clever with the methods you use, and research strategy.
Again, itโs not about quantity of info. Itโs about the relevance of what you know.
(go through the slide in stages)
Is your focus to know more about your userโs base - how they live, what they like, how they work, problems they experience, etc (the why) - or know more about the product (the what) - identify friction points, feature gaps, performance, medium adequacy, interface usability, etc
Users: itโs essentially qualitative and ethnographic.
Focus groups and contextual inquiry, interviews, observations. Help to define the problem space, to get inside the heads of customers, and to learn how to package and position ideas in ways that resonate with consumers. Helps frame how customers think about the product, let you see the product through a new customerโs eyes, and enable you to generate lots of new ideas.
Product: itโs essentially quantitative: surveys, competitive analysis, card sorting, usability testing
generative: give insights and ideas about your users and product. Itโs about discovery.
Evaluative: is about learning if the hypothesis is aligned with the findings and if you need to change your course of action.
Focusing on the small cycles will bring you towards a successful big picture.
Be strategic scoping the outcomes you enable, to help you build a solid knowledge foundation.
(slide words)
This is the right path to take: launch to learn.
At the end of the day you want to validate your hypothesis, and find a way to minimize your assumptions.
you want to understand if your product is in fact empowering the user, or on the contrary, failing him.
Are you succeeding at what you set out to do? Is the business goal being accomplished?
Thereโs no better way of knowing this than putting the product in the hands of the user and monitor that relationship, that interaction.
Likewise researching strategies that inform hypothesis, monitoring and measuring give you friction points, help you identify them:
Which pages arenโt getting attention?
At what moment is the user dropping the flow?
How are they sticking to a journey or do we identify back and forward?
Are the conversations being as expected?
Is this an Ui/ Interface issue or is It a journey, flow issue?
Are the users using the product in a total unexpected way, revealing latent needs?
The best learnings will come from crossing data of these highly effective tools.
(slide topics explain)
The mesh created by layering these different insights will surface user behaviours and product opportunities that you wouldnโt be able know or spot before launching.
So itโs really important you put time and effort into this.
Youโre driving your productโs next win.
Something is not done after launch. Itโs just the start of a new cycle.
The moment zero of your next iteration.
Did it work? We are trying to prove your hypothesis?
The learnings are a bridge that will inform not only the the scope of what the next steps are. Will refine your โbetterโ, โcause suddenly your framework of knowledge just got bigger. Your context has grown.
People get complacent, we all do. But to be disruptive you canโt!!!
What you thought 6, 2, 1 months ago, has suddenly changed.Context isnโt stagnant, its a living organism. It grows with your product.
And context is the key ingredient for success.
And only though monitoring and research you can both make it grow and find ways of break it down again to define manageable scopes, that keep success steady.
The way to manage the successful fast deployment of lovable, addictive products is to balance these 3 factors.
-speed, refinement and evidence.
Find your balance, advance your design/prod process to level these 3 factors.
Itโs key to speed a successful product to market.
Each informed and intentional small iteration gets your product closer to what a user needs and wants.
To that โbetterโ goal.
And drive your companyโs growth.
Weโll have 10min to talk a bit more about this, 3-5 questions eventually, and if you are interested on how this works daily at shopify Iโm happy to talk about it. Happy to connect after the event also to bounce some ideas. So reach out.
