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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Dan Olsen
Read between
September 12, 2019 - June 27, 2020
If you are targeting businesses, you'll use firmographics instead; these are to organizations what demographics are to people, and include traits such as company size and industry. Two well-known systems used to identify industries are the Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes and the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS).
The buyer often has distinct needs from the end user that need to be addressed to achieve product-market fit, and you should define your target buyer in addition to your target customer when warranted.
As with most endeavors involving a large number of people, if you don't write it down, share it, and discuss it, chances are that everyone won't be on the same page.
Personas should fit on a single page and provide a snapshot of the customer archetype that's quick to digest, and usually include the following information: Name Representative photograph Quote that conveys what they most care about Job title Demographics Needs/goals Relevant motivations and attitudes Related tasks and behaviors Frustrations/pain points with current solution Level of expertise/knowledge (in the relevant domain, e.g., level of computer savvy) Product usage context/environment (e.g., laptop in a loud, busy office or tablet on the couch at home) Technology adoption life cycle
...more
If you have customers, you can use interviews and surveys. Talking to customers in one-on-one interviews is the best way to build this knowledge.
Once you know the right questions to ask, surveys can help you collect data from many customers at once.
You can always use your judgment to make initial hypotheses about your target customer's attributes, and then test those hypotheses by talking to prospective customers who match that profile.
you will mainly talk with prospective customers to gain a deeper understanding of their needs, usage of current solutions, and pain points so you can identify potential product opportunities.
To be useful, a persona should be pragmatic and provide useful information that can help inform product design decisions.
Customers are generally not skilled at discussing the problem space; they are better at telling you what they like and dislike about a particular solution.
One thing to know about customer needs is that they are like onions: they have multiple layers, each with a deeper layer just below it.
A benefit conveys value, which means it's doing something for the customer.
What does this statement mean to you? (to check their understanding) How might this help you? If a product delivered this benefit, how valuable would that be to you?
For a response of high or very high value: Why would this be of value to you? For a response of low or no value: Why wouldn't this be of value to you?
“Why is that important to you?” until it doesn't lead to any new answers. This helps elevate the discussion from more granular, detailed benefits to higher-level benefits.
When we ask why again, we learn that the ultimate motivation is that he wants to be accepted by his peers.
high importance, low satisfaction quadrant is the best place to pursue opportunities.
it is generally agreed that 5-point scales are best for unipolar and 7-point scales are best for bipolar—which explains why I recommend the choices above.
But even if you can't easily reach thousands of people, you can still obtain meaningful results.
Statistical significance is great when you have the sample size to achieve it, but it isn't an all or nothing proposition.
“For most jobs, even those that may seem somewhat trivial, there are typically 50 to 150 or more desired outcomes—not just a handful.”
Focus is critical when defining a new product.
Here's what Steve Jobs had to say about saying “no”: People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.
clear value proposition decreases the likelihood that you are just launching a “me too” product, focuses your resources on what's most important, and increases your chances of success.
You should be practicing divergent thinking, which means trying to generate as many ideas as possible without any judgment or evaluation.
The longer you work on a product without getting customer feedback, the more you risk a major disconnect that subsequently requires significant rework.
In general, when you are first starting to develop your product or marketing materials, it is most beneficial to start with qualitative tests to gain some initial understanding. If you jump straight into quantitative tests without doing any qualitative tests, they usually don't perform as well—and even if they do, you won't know why.
However, handy tools like Optimizely and Unbounce make landing page testing and optimization faster and easier with less development effort.
Popular A/B testing tools include Optimizely, Unbounce, KISSmetrics, Visual Website Optimizer, and Google Content Experiments (part of Google Analytics).
Entrepreneurs who are full-time employees but have a startup idea they want to pursue can use crowdfunding as a way to mitigate risk before taking the plunge.
Crowdfunding sites can be a great way to connect with early adopters for your product.
You want to reduce this risk by showing customers design deliverables earlier in the process to ensure that customers will value the product that your developers are going to spend their valuable time building.
The Airbnb team saw that their hypothesis was true: listings with professional photographs had two to three times more bookings than the market average.
That being said, leading A/B testing tools such as KISSmetrics offer ways to integrate with your internal server-side A/B platform.
The more user effort required to take an action, the lower the percentage of users who will take that action. The less user effort required, the higher the percentage of users who will take that action.
One common and useful deliverable from user research is the persona.
designing for the smallest screen first since this forces them to prioritize what is most important.
who has this set of four essential skills—product management, interaction design, visual design, and front-end development—the “A-Team”
As I've discussed, you should be showing your designs to customers to identify and resolve any issues.
you have “product blindness”: blind spots for the issues that a new user will readily encounter within minutes of using your product.
I recommend conducting user tests with one customer at a time for the best results.
The best way out of this trap is to just blindly schedule users on a routine basis.
I also recommend that teams get a resource to help recruit and schedule users for tests.
