User Research-Driven Leadership is Product Management
Updated: Aug 10
Table of Contents
Innovation thrives when we can seize opportunities in moments of struggle.
We’ve entered the age of the customer, where understanding their lives, motivations, and challenges is paramount. Our customers seek solutions to overcome obstacles and achieve their goals, knowing their bonuses, pay raises, and promotions are linked to their success. They turn to us for our products, solutions, and services.
Understanding Customer Needs is the Path to Innovation
Our customers desire familiarity and understanding from us, not only of their stories but also of their actual needs, which often differ from their initial requests. They expect us to grasp their entire journey, the tasks they must complete, the reasons behind these tasks, the consequences of failure, cultural influences, and their use of alternative tools to meet their objectives.
They prefer minimal human interaction and expect our products, solutions, and services to enhance their work lives without the need for customer support. Current financial uncertainties drive this shift, compelling customers to seek value in their investments.
Our customers exist independently of our products. Therefore, it's crucial that we understand their lives beyond our offerings. Recognizing their moments of struggle when they face challenges or fail to complete tasks is key. These are the opportunities for innovation. To achieve this, we rely on the expertise of our user experience research (UXR) partners. They provide insights that guide our user experience design teams, helping us to understand our customers' stories and their lives beyond our products.
Product and Research Partnership
Our user experience research (UXR) partners can help us solidify the four key aspects: who, when, where, and why. This allows us to move beyond relying solely on personas and ideal customer profiles. Understanding these dimensions will guide us in determining what we need to build.
When our customers face challenges, we want them to turn to our products, solutions, and services. Our UXR partners can capture these critical moments and experiences, enabling us to create a roadmap that encapsulates these distressing instances. This approach ensures our solutions are problem-focused, relevant, and impactful.
Research-driven leadership in product management
We’ve all heard the old sayings: “Build it, and they will come” or “Design a product, then find people who need it.” Times have changed. Today, successful products do the job they were designed for, addressing real customer needs. Influential product leaders and cross-functional teams identify struggling moments and problems worth solving for their customers.
Product leaders who inspire and nurture intellectual fortitude within cross-functional teams pave the way for fearless innovation. True innovation occurs when we take the time to understand our customers' stories and their lives beyond our products, solutions, and services. By capturing their challenges and moments of hardship, we can identify when they need different solutions or improvements. Our user experience research (UXR) partners are crucial in uncovering these insights, enabling our customers to turn to our products. Let’s explore what this means for product management.
#1 - User Experience Insight
Our user experience research (UXR) partners play a crucial role in helping product leaders and multifunctional teams discover, substantiate, and differentiate between what customers need versus what they communicate. They also assist in pinpointing areas for improving existing products.
#2 - Discovery Phase
Collaboration between UXR and product management (PM) is not just important; it's vital during the discovery process. UXR ensures that we move beyond our hypotheses and view customers beyond the lens of our products. They can identify and assess risks and obstacles, advising us on how to overcome them. Their insights are essential for cross-functional teams to gather information, evaluate alternative solutions, and decide what to build.
#3 - Product Validation
Validation is a critical part of the product development process. Product managers rely on UXR partners to validate hypotheses and product features. Once design partners approve a prototype, UXR leads testing with relevant audiences. Feedback and insights from users help confirm if we are solving a problem, addressing a struggling moment, or achieving product-market fit.
#4 - Product Launch
The collaboration continues post-launch. UXR partners help measure audience reactions and analyze product performance. Together, we can identify necessary iterations to build on the momentum and ensure the product, feature, or functionality continues to meet customer needs and expectations.
Final thoughts
The relationship between product managers and user experience researchers is highly effective due to excellent communication, transparency, and, most importantly, trust. Product leaders share everything—the strengths and weaknesses—with their UXR partners and involve them and design colleagues in all meetings with customers, multidisciplinary teams, and leadership. They also share the product vision, strategy, roadmap, customer and business value, metrics, and data. This collaboration enables UXR partners to ask additional questions and find creative solutions to problems, ultimately driving the product's success.
To truly understand our customers' stories beyond our product and to recognize their end-to-end journey and unspoken needs, we rely on our user experience research partners. They capture the struggling moments that define our customers' experiences. Our UXR colleagues understand the complexity of human decision-making processes. Our goal is to be so attuned to our customers that we can anticipate their needs and provide solutions without them having to verbalize their struggles.
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