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INTRODUCTION

Eighty-six percent¹ of product ideas are born from a developer’s personal pain. These ideas are for products nobody needs. Developers believe research with users is a waste of time. They perceive their product as a coding exercise. To validate their idea, they ask their sister if she likes it. She says yes.

I live in North New Jersey, East Coast USA. For four years, we leased a house in which we had a detached garage (see Figure I.1). We never parked our cars there because the driveway between the garage and the street was 100 feet (~30 meters) long and shoveling that much snow in the wintertime was not a skill I had acquired (or wished to acquire). We mostly used it to store “outdoorsy” toys for our kids. Every winter, when the weather turned very cold, the keypad to open the garage door froze over and stopped working. Definitely a problem.

To open the door, once a year, I crawled into the garage through a small window (which became smaller and smaller every year, I have no idea why) and turned the garage door system from Automatic to Manual. This way, the kids were able to open and close the garage door while bypassing the frozen keypad. When spring arrived, I switched the door opening system back to Automatic. Same story every year.

FIGURE I.1 My garage door problem. The keypad froze during winter and instead of calling a technician, I crawled through the window and switched the door to manual.

I had a problem and found a bypass for solving it. The problem was that my garage door keypad froze over every winter. The solution was to pick up the phone, talk with my landlord, get a quote from a technician to fix it, argue with my landlord about the cost, get another quote, and so on. Yet, I wasn’t doing that for some reason. I didn’t care enough about this problem to solve it properly.

Why I Wrote This Book

My story isn’t unique. We all have problems that we work around for one reason or another instead of doing the logical thing. In my story, the important problem was my relationship with my landlord, not the frozen keypad. It’s the same thing with product development and user research. In far too many cases, people, teams, and organizations develop products that nobody needs, that do not solve any problem, or even worse, solve problems that users don’t care enough about.

In this book, you’ll learn how to answer your most burning questions about your users (or potential users) with quick-and-dirty research techniques that anyone can apply. You’ll learn (among other things) how to identify what users really need, who these users are, and how they currently solve problems they care about.

The Structure of the Book

The structure of this book is simple: it’s based on interviews I held with 200 startup founders, enterprise product managers, and venture capitalists from all over the world. During those interviews, I asked what questions they asked themselves about their users (or future users). I gathered hundreds such questions together, which I then, with the help of 50 entrepreneurs, organized into eight groups. Each group of questions was summarized into one question, which became a chapter in this book. Furthermore, each chapter is a step-by-step, how-to guide that answers the question at stake with one to three user research methods (see Figure I.2).

FIGURE I.2 Each question (asked in a different stage of a product’s lifecycle) represents a chapter in the book.

Goals of This Book

The clear result of my interviews with 200 product managers and startup founders was that there’s a need for lean user research guidance that is specific, approachable, and easy to implement. The following are the goals set for this book.

Change How People Answer Their Most Burning Questions About Users

Probably the most important finding of my research was uncovering the top questions that product managers, startup founders, and venture capitalists ask themselves about their users or potential users (see Figure I.3). The good news is that they ask the right questions. Not only that, but they even know the order of importance of these questions. Sadly, the bad news is that people answer these questions in invalid, unreliable, and sometimes unbelievable ways. Here are some representative examples:

• Who are my customers?

“We look at analytics data.”

• Do people need my product?

“Doh, of course they do, because we created it.”

• Is the product usable?

“We focus on UX. We use the product ourselves.”

• Is our product better than the competition?

“We have no competition,” then (after acknowledging they do),

“We do things differently.”

• Is our product getting better?

“We improve it all the time, so yes.”

• Do people want the product?

“I asked my sister, and she said yes.”

FIGURE I.3 The top questions product development practitioners, startup founders, and venture capitalists ask themselves.

Shorten the Road Between Wanting to Do Research and Actually Doing It

This book will show you how to do research, including detailed steps, templates, examples, videos, resources, and practice exercises. You’ll have everything you need to start your own research to answer your questions about users. Basically, you’ll have everything you need with this book, its companion website (leanresearch.co), and YouTube Channel (bit.ly/validating-youtube).

Change Perceptions About Research

Let’s face it—people often have incorrect perceptions and myths associated with user research. This book changes those perceptions and hopefully busts the following myths:

• Research is academic.

• Research is time-consuming.

• Research is very expensive.

• Only an elite squad of PhDs can do research.

• Research isn’t actionable.

• Research can’t help in making high-risk product design and roadmap decisions.

• Lean user research is all about A/B testing and analyzing analytics data.

Change the Source of Product Ideas

Eighty-six percent of people interviewed for this book testified that their product or startup idea came from pain they had experienced personally. For example, I interviewed a software engineer who lost track of her child at the beach and was frantic until good people helped find him. That engineer started a company that introduced an app to solve this problem. Or a young computer science student who had been coding since he was 9 years old and had an idea for a really smart way of identifying spaghetti code and decided to patent and frame it into a service package.

There’s no doubt that personal pain signals there’s an opportunity to solve a problem. Many entrepreneurs are sure they have a problem worth solving due to their own personal experience. But, they often fail to recognize that an almost tangible “fact” in their mind is just an assumption that should be tested, validated, or most likely, invalidated. Figure I.4 shows what 200 product managers and startup founders told me about where ideas for products come from. Notice that user research is last with only two percent of my interviewees.

FIGURE I.4 The vast majority of ideas for new products and services come from a personal pain the owner of the idea has experienced.

Jump!

In a scene from the film White Men Can’t Jump, Woody Harrelson and Rosie Perez are in bed together; she is studying for Jeopardy, and he is just lying around. She turns to him and says, “Honey, I’m thirsty,” so he gets up, walks to the kitchen sink, fills up a glass of water, comes back, lies down in bed, and hands her the glass of water. She takes the glass of water, looks at it, and tosses it in his face. He says, “What the hell, what did I do wrong?” and she says, “Honey, I said I was thirsty. I didn’t want a glass of water. I wanted empathy. I wanted you to say I know what it’s like to be thirsty.”

Brad Feld describes this beautiful, little scene and uses it to explain the essence of the differences between the two—where he went to solve her problem and all she wanted was some empathy.

To understand humans, their needs, and whether products meet those needs, you too need to develop empathy. Empathy is an intentional effort of understanding the thoughts of another person while uncovering their reasoning, as Indi Young² defines it. It’s not just being able to feel what another person feels because you have already experienced a similar situation. When you develop empathy toward another person, a future customer, you want to learn from that person about his or her needs, behavior, and problems.