Unlocking the Power of Customer Understanding: The Key to Successful Product Management
As a product manager, your most critical responsibility is to develop a deep understanding of your customers. This understanding is more crucial than any process, roadmap, or technical skill. It’s the foundation upon which you prioritize tasks, plan roadmaps, and identify areas for investment. But how do you turn this vague concept into actionable product roadmaps?
The Bridge to Tangible Products: Customer Pain Points
Customer pain points are the problems or challenges customers face when trying to accomplish a specific task. They’re the bridge that turns customer understanding into tangible products. When you build a product, you’re building solutions to these pain points. A deep understanding of not just who your customer is, but the exact pain points they struggle with, will help you build a great product.
Examples of Customer Pain Points
Let’s consider two examples. As a dog owner, I struggle to hold a leash, treats, potty bags, my wallet, and my phone while walking my dog. The job I’m trying to accomplish is walking my dog, and the pain point is having too many things to hold. There are many solutions for this, such as buying a bag or getting a hands-free leash.
In a business setting, it’s challenging to get engineers to include tracking for product events. The job I’m trying to accomplish is measuring the usage of product features, and the pain point is having to manually add tracking every single time. Again, there are many solutions for this, such as choosing a different product event tracking vendor or creating a feature release checklist.
Why Understanding Customer Pain Points Matters
Understanding customer pain points ensures that you don’t build features that no one will use. They help you choose one solution over another, identify areas of product expansion, and build the right solution. Customer pain points can also guide innovation within the scope of what customers want.
Digging Deeper: The “Why” Behind Customer Pain Points
To build the right solution, you need to ask yourself the “why” question at least three times to get down to the root of the customer pain point. This helps you identify the underlying reasons behind the pain point and build a solution that addresses those reasons.
Types of Customer Pain Points and How to Discover Them
There are three types of customer pain points: strategic, onboarding, and adoption pain points. Strategic pain points are deeply core to your product and company, while onboarding pain points occur early in the customer lifecycle. Adoption pain points occur later in the customer lifecycle, after a customer has been onboarded but hasn’t become a net promoter of the product yet.
You can discover these pain points through customer interviews, surveys, support tickets, and product analytics tools. By asking “why” via customer interviews, you can identify the underlying reasons behind the pain points. Product analytics tools can help you identify when users drop off in their onboarding journey and where they experience friction.
The Power of Analytics Tools in Discovering Customer Pain Points
Product analytics tools can help you uncover pain points that you may not even realize your customers are having. They offer insights into user journeys and important funnels, allowing you to identify where users drop off and why. By leveraging individual session recordings, you can figure out exactly what users were trying to do at the time they dropped off.
The Impact of Understanding Customer Pain Points
Understanding your customers and the pain points they are trying to solve is the key to becoming a great product manager. Customer pain points are intimately tied to how you build the best solutions, prioritize roadmaps, and drive business outcomes. By diving deep into the “why” behind customer pain points, you can ensure that you’re truly solving deeply rooted problems for your customers.