 Hello everyone and welcome to this week's Product School webinar. Thanks for joining us today. Just in case you didn't know, Product School teaches product management, coding, data analytics, digital marketing, UX design and product leadership courses online and our 16 campuses worldwide. On top of that, every week we offer some amazing local product management events and host online webinars, live streams and ask me anything sessions. Head over to productschool.com after this webinar to check them out. Hi everyone. My name is Avi Noem Zelenko. I am a senior product manager at Atlassian and I work on Confluence Cloud. Today I will be talking about how to best hear not the users but the people that are using your product. So my kids are actually my key to hearing customers which I know can be a little bit strange to hear at first but bear with me. Over the years being a product manager and having become a parent about six years ago I've been noticing similarities between kids and customers. Not in a bad way actually in a very good and compassionate way. So the first thing I noticed is they're both real people, right? They have real needs. They're not just these children aren't just these little people. They're people with full ranges of emotions and customers aren't just people behind an email or feedback. They're people the same way we are for any other product. As people, generally kids, customers were very driven by emotions. So everything we do has an emotional trigger first and they kind of think you can do anything. So your kids look up to you and they think that you're a dentist. They think that you're Superman. They think that, you know, if you know how to use a screwdriver then you could probably build a house. But I feel that customers also have a similar expectation where as a product manager sometimes there's a feature or something that they would really, really want and there's a sense of, you know, you are the product manager. If anybody can make it happen then it's you. And I think generally this is something that we share broadly as people but I feel it comes across in these examples as well. It's very difficult for anyone to articulate why they feel what they're feeling especially when they're an emotional state. And I feel that it's no different when that comes to customers when they have a bad experience or either, you know, when your child is very upset about something as an example. And the way I've been thinking about this is I think I tried using the sentence treat your customers like kids and that came off very negative and I get it. So I added a little nuance by saying what about if we treated our customers like they were our children and that feels very different. That's much closer to our heart. And what I mean by that is if we would treat customers like they were our own children or someone we care deeply about, we'd be a lot more tuned into their unmet needs, not just the words that they say. So when they say, I don't like feature XYZ, it's digging deeper. It's thinking about what's the unmet need versus just taking things at face value. The second thing is about honest compassion and not having judgment. When someone you care about deeply is going through something hard, you first of all practice compassion. You don't go to judge them first and our customers deserve the exact same approach. And the last thing is you focus more on what they feel and whenever they feel it, you feel that too. So there is no disconnect. If they're happy, you're genuinely happy. If they're not, then you're generally not going to feel good in that moment. So sometimes customer feedback feels like this. And I can say that my kids have been in the situation maybe even daily, even though that's not one of my kids. But it does get hard, right? Like sometimes it feels like an overreaction, but that's not a fair way to judge it. And the things that we've been looking at both as a team and things that I've been trying to practice also on and off work, both as a PM and as a parent is around this thing called compassionate listening. And that breaks down into a few things. First of all, it's focusing on the why over the what or the how. So the example that I love in the movie that I watched with my kids recently, which is the Grinch, was the Grinch was alienated because something happened in the past that alienated him. And nobody really regarded him. But this little girl was able to look past what he does, how he does it. So not looking necessarily at the fact that he was behaving in a mean way or that he's trying to steal Christmas. But it was why he did it. She noticed that he felt lonely. And once she brought him in, she was actually able to get him connected with the community. And he kind of lost his grudge and stopped becoming the bad old Grinch. And I feel a lot of times when we interact with customers, it's not about what they say, even if it's very passionate, it's not even about how they say it. It's really about trying to say, you know, why are they saying this? Or even why? What did we do to put them in a situation to say that? That's more long, compassionate listening. The second piece is to focus more on relationships and empathy versus sympathy. So the main difference, if you think about it between sympathy and empathy would be is if you feel sympathy for your customers, that's kind of seeing them in a tough situation, but then saying, man, like that looks bad, kind of folding your arms and saying, I hope you'll be okay, but you're not really in there with them. Empathy is reaching out and saying, that looks hard, but how can I help you? I want to be there. And I think that's what this picture is trying to say. And that's how you build a relationship. Not by looking at it from the side and commenting, but by getting in there and feeling that pain and helping out where you can. And the last piece for compassionate listening, which seems kind of obvious, but I think I can't stress it enough, is it's always about people over users. So day to day, you've seen different parts of the industry change language for valid reasons. You're seeing less and less heads of human resources and more heads of people. And the language is becoming more human. And I think when we regard the people that are using our products or paying us, they're harder in dollars to use the products, is we need to regard them as people because we're customers of other products as well. And we're all just people. So I think using that little language change helps a lot in building that empathy. Because when you say users, kind of feels like a number that you look at in an analytics dashboard. The next piece was it really goes into uncovering unmet needs. And this was what I was talking about before saying it's not just about the face value things that you hear or see, both in a qualitative standpoint and both from a quantitative standpoint, but it's going deeper. And some tactics that we've learned and I've been using and I wanted to share about how to go through uncovering unmet needs. I think there's two categories. One is when you have lots of feedback coming in, and you're not really sure what to do with it. It's just like massive tons of verbatim and you're not really sure of where do I start first. So a great framework that I completely have taken from the jobs to be done framework is around looking for kind of the opportunity score. So essentially thinking about it, what is an underserved need? An underserved need basically means that there is a topic or a tool or something that is of very high importance, but it has a low satisfaction level. Now you can use this post for the product that you're specifically working on or a feature within the product that you're working on. You can also use this to gauge your entire product versus another product set in the market. If you want to evaluate an opportunity maybe for a new feature or a new type of product, the idea is once you gauge this relationship, then generally things that have high importance but low satisfaction levels are where there's a growth opportunity because people really, really need something that care about it. They're willing to spend a lot of time and effort in going into it, but they're not satisfied. And if you can help with that satisfaction part, then you have demand. So a simple way of going through an opportunity score, and we've used this for like looking at verbatim of customer satisfaction, saying what are the themes that we should look at first? How do we prioritize? So we've actually taken this and you can make this kind of your own. You don't have to use it as is, is you kind of take the importance of something and you basically add to that the importance by subtracting the stack rank different themes coming in as what kind of opportunity do they present? So again, for us, we were looking at to calculate the actual importance and satisfaction as if there's a customer satisfaction score coming in, maybe we say importance is by the percentage of feedback from a certain theme that comes in as part of the overall and satisfaction could be just by categorizing feedback into three buckets of positive, neutral, negative. So again, you can make it your own. The idea is it's a framework to work with them. But then what if you have no feedback, then everything's fine, right? Not really. I think that's actually the scariest part is when there's either silence and you feel everything's okay. That's usually when you start or you should need to start to behave the most paranoid. Now I'll give you a real life example, which I think everybody can try to relate to and in the theme of my children. So the example is the following. The PM in this case is my incredible wife. She's actually an engineer. Yeah, I think she should be a PM, but she doesn't always agree. The customers are my kids. The importance is ridiculously high, right? Because we're talking about toys, like, let's be honest. And the satisfaction is low. But this is where it gets interesting. The kids didn't say their satisfaction was low. My wife didn't even know that she was looking at the following key metrics when she went through this exercise on her own mind. The utilization rate was really low. So only the two bottom shelves were ever getting used, even though we had like this great stack of four shelves, super robust, all the toys you can get to, right? That sounds familiar. The retention rate was actually though. We were noticing that the preferred toys that they wanted to play with, they would actually move to different rooms. They'd put it in another living room. Maybe they brought into their bedroom so they could play with it. And the self-serve rate was really low. So there wasn't any deflection, you know, quote, unquote, going on. There was high touch. So the cool toys, generally, what you can't get is what you want. The cool toys were on the top. So you had to call in mom and dad. We have to get it. So it doesn't really serve the purpose that it was supposed to serve. And the direct customer feedback or explanation of the problem was none. Kids didn't say anything. They didn't say I'm unhappy with the way you've organized the toys. They need to play. They play. So this is what happened to the toy shelves after my wife took the initiative to change them. And you'll notice there's less toys, which kind of feels like a little less features. They're organized based on how many, like the toys that the kids actually like the most. And now they're perfectly at eye level. And what's really cool is all our key metrics are moving up and to the right. So if you think about it, the kids are spending more time engaged with the toys. They're spending more time playing with each other, kind of without having to bring in an adult to help them out, which is great. So they're feeling more independent. And essentially, all of our metrics are moving up point being is you don't always have to wait for a customer to say that something's wrong. And generally, we think that if we have a lot of feedback on something or where, and when we don't have feedback on something, everything's okay. So again, just to reiterate that point, I think that's when you need to feel paranoid and start thinking about what are the metrics and are they actually healthy? And how can we hear the people who are using the product and do something before they even ask for it? Special credits, obviously, go to Mary Condo, which has been our inspiration for some of the reorganization and probably for many other people nowadays as well. This is a really interesting topic, which I wanted to share in this kind of general theme, which has come up within our team. We noticed that as we go through defining our problem statement and eventually coming into solution hearing is we've started to use a tactic, which we've kind of coined as emotional solution hearing. And the way it looks is something like this. You start off assuming again, you have your problem statement and certain metrics. Once you go into trying to define what solutions can be mapped to them, you start by identifying sub pain points of the kind of main problem statement. And examples of sub pain points could be as the as the person using the product, I don't understand what this is solving for me, or I don't understand how to use this feature, or I can't find X when I need it urgently. And I'm sure we've all encountered these with different products that we use. The second step is to map these pain points to an emotion that's actually invoked. So in the first one, emotions that can be invoked is like the deeper, the better that you can go. It could be like, I get angry. I start feeling hesitant. Maybe it's a B2B product. And I started looking bad in front of my peers. The next one could be as I feel stupid. It makes me feel kind of shameful. I feel incompetent to what I do, even when nobody else is looking, or maybe it just introduces fear because I don't know what's going to happen next. And the next one could be as obviously you feel frustrated, or sometimes you look at the product and you downright think as a customer that when you have this pain point, if you can't find something, that means that the feature isn't missing, which is the worst because that means you've spent probably a long time building a feature, but people don't even think it exists. And the third step is the approach that we've been taking is to prioritize the pain first. And this goes in before any other classic privatization frameworks. So in this example, we would actually prioritize the second one because it has the most breadth and depth of emotions that are invoked. Again, emotions can be happy emotions, but generally if you're trying to solve a problem, the emotions will be negative. So we would prioritize the first, the second one first, the top one second, and then the last one third. And a good sanity check that we noticed to put in place is you really want to make sure is this better for the business or is this better for the customer? And a little framework that we put together is you basically plot how much this will improve business outcome versus how much this is going to reduce pain or increase happiness depending on what problem you're solving. And the guideline is you want to be on the right side of the quadrant, right? Top right means it's a win-win for both. Bottom right means it's mainly for the people using the product, which is probably a good over indexing, but then sometimes if it comes at the expense of the business, that's not good either. And the bottom left usually want to stay away from the top left. Again, you want to refrain because they're very business driven with the exception of a lot of times projects like infrastructure changes or things that might be transparent to customers or you see the value down the line, you do need to do them and they're kind of driven by the business, but in the long term they will become better for customers even if they can't see the actual feature. And another kind of good empathy building exercise is we found works really well on team is we kind of go through the worst moment analysis, which means you want to try to play out the absolute worst moments your products can fail the people using your product. An example could be is day-to-day we look at metrics and we try to optimize for them as proxies for experiences, but when you think about the worst moment or what the missed opportunity is, it really goes deep and it helps build a lot of empathy. So let's say for example there's a metric of page load time, but what if you thought about it that someone using your product can't show their boss something super important just when they need to? Now that's really deep. The implications could be that that could cost somebody their job, somebody could look really bad and not get the promotion they were looking for and it helps to think about it that way versus just saying page load time kind of slipped by 2% and it's not too bad. We really don't know what could happen because of that 2%. Another example could be streaming rate, but then think about the moment is like somebody wants to play a background song for like an impromptu wedding proposal and it just doesn't work. So you say you know streaming rate is fine decreased by 0.5, but what a moment in this and I think again like crash rate would be the same thing is there's this awesome moment. Your kids are swimming with dolphins and you want to take a picture of unicorn dolphins forgot to mention that, but the camera doesn't work. So again we look at this all the time like what's our crash free rate? 100 is great and sometimes we say it's 99.8 but what happened in that 0.2%. The last aspect aside from just helping yourself hear the people in your product is helping your team and this can get very challenging especially around customer interviews because everybody is so prone to you know, recency bias. Last thing you heard is the last thing you think is important and it's hard to synthesize what you decide to share with the team and what they take away from it and how you make that like a real genuine useful process for everyone. This is a framework that I actually took from Atlassian before I joined Atlassian. I used it at a previous company that I was working at. It's the customer interview pyramid. The idea of the process is you take down your notes in the interview and make them as raw as possible but when you approach your notes and trying to structure them into something useful and actionable is you start using this pyramid approach by starting from the bottom as you say just look at observations. It's almost like don't be judgmental just see things that are happening and note them down. The next piece is take those observations and try to interpret what specific problems you can see from them and at the very end is try to connect it to an opportunity. The whole point of this pyramid is to try and postpone jumping into solutions and fast conclusions fast. The next thing to do is do an open customer interview analysis session with your team or anybody who wants to join make it as open as possible let people come in go through the framework step by step with the team then you document and share out broadly with clear next steps. This really helps with getting the message across the team making it kind of everyone's initiative versus one person sharing with kind of one opinion that rules it all and just to wrap up you know parting thoughts would be is sometimes you know like it seems obvious but I would really urge everybody imagine like the people who are using your product are sensitive emotional real people just like you and I because they are with really deep needs and wants and they're actually the most dependent people on you in your professional life just the same way as a parents your children are the most dependent people on you in life and I think that's the level of responsibility that we should always strive for with our customers and the people in the product and the idea is to try and build relationships connect with the people in your product reach out and like be genuine but especially especially especially as the example with the shelves do it when they're not looking do the right thing for them when they're not looking that would be it thank you very much for listening anybody who's joining this webinar I hope you found this useful thank you