 Hey, I'm E.D. I work at Expedia and I came into PM from an engineering background. So I actually found my path because of user research. And this talk is to inspire others who are looking to make the leap into PM and also kind of give some high level idea of how user research works. So I got my start in product when I was doing my master's in computer science at Georgia Tech. And over there I joined a lab where we were studying the breadboard and how we could, how we can change it. If you're not familiar, the breadboard is this tool that's used by novice and advanced users to design circuits. And it's actually kind of complex, you know, all the different holes in this row connect to each other in all the columns. Those holes in the columns connect to each other. And it's a small piece of technology, but it has its, it has its set of rules. And if you don't understand them, it can be difficult to accomplish any kind of task. So we asked ourselves, is this really the best tool to be using to learn how to build circuits for the very first time? It feels like the breadboard is not a one size fits all type of tool. You have new users, you have grad students, you have very advanced users. And this one technology cannot possibly accommodate all the different types of needs that they have. So we realized that maybe for novice users, it's better if they have smaller pieces to work with. If those pieces are color coded, if they have a variety of different pieces, then they can kind of play with them, like their puzzle pieces and move them around on the table. And thus we built this design. And we decided to test it out in a real live classroom with high school students. And I share this story because I found it super helpful when I started applying to PM jobs, and I didn't have very much PM background to begin with. But I realized that, you know, even technical products need user research too. Behind these technical products are real users that have pain points and goals and needs, and they experience products just like anybody else. They have difficulty using them or they enjoy using them. And as I went through the process of studying something so technical like the breadboard, I realized just how important it is to understand your customer's pain points and how useful user research can be in developing that understanding. So if you're looking to go into product or you're already in product, you should really look to user research to being one of your sharpest tools in your toolbox. It really creates clarity. For starters, you know, if you're working on a project that has no quantitative data, you can look to user research to provide some qualitative data and help you make some kind of calculator risk to build that MVP and then gather quantitative data to back it up. Another reason to care about user research is that you can motivate your teams and inspire their best ideas. So say you're working with a multi-discipline team, you know, designers, analytics, and engineers. How do you rally everyone around this project together? Well, what if you told them that, hey, we interviewed six people that went on a trip this past year and all six of them said they spent over 20 hours planning their trip on Expedia. And it's time that we help them spend less time on booking their next vacation. Now there is something, there is some qualitative data that can really rally the team. And an added bonus is that you can build customer confidence in the product and the breath, especially for enterprise products. So with enterprise products, you know, if you have really high quality top-paying customers in your top tier and you actually interview the most passionate users of your products and you build the features that they care about the most, they're going to tell management who buys licenses that they should keep buying licenses because their feedback is important to the product team. So you're going to build more confidence and trust with your customers by interviewing them and taking their suggestions and their pain points into consideration when you're building the next version of the product. So how does it work? What do you have to do? Well, step one, you need to form a hypothesis or hypotheses. So if you're setting a new feature or product area, then you want to go a little bit more broad and go with this format of I believe some type of person experiences some type of problem when doing some type of task. So for example, you know, I'm a new parent, so I'll use this example. I believe parents experience fear about infant health when putting their infants to sleep. This is probably a hypothesis from the people who developed the Halo Sleep Sack. And just a little shout out, I took this example from the Lean Customer Development Book, building products your customers will buy by Sydney Opera. If you're testing out a solution to a problem, then it's a little more specific. So you can take this pattern that we use at work. If we do this, then this will happen because of this. So if we do some kind of solution, then this will happen. So some metric will move because of this. An example I've used before is if we give travelers a way to contact the vacation rental owner about questions on the property details page, then path progression from details to checkout will increase because travelers will have more confidence that the vacation rental meets the requirements of their trip. So I told you what the solution is, which is allow travelers to contact the owner of the property. I told you the metric that we're going to move with this path progression. And then I told you the reason why, because you're more confident that this is going to be the right place for you to stay on your vacation when you've asked the owner some questions and all of your concerns have been met. So you have your hypotheses. Seems like you're ready to start to design and implement your study. There's a lot of different ways to implement this study. And I'm just going to talk about a few here. One way is interviews. So interviews are really helpful if you have some really broad topics because you're just beginning on a new product area or a new feature area. So make sure that your questions are not leading questions. Don't say it must be frustrating when you do XYZ, right? Or you're kind of encouraging someone to say yes to that one. Maybe just ask them to tell you about a time they booked a trip. So you keep the question pretty broad and you will hear their frustration as they tell their story. Another type of method is task analysis. So ask them to do something like, hey, I want to see you book a trip on Expedia. Okay, cool. Share your screen. Talk me through what you're doing. Talk me through your thought process. And so when the participant talks you through their thought process, you're getting their cognitive walkthrough and you're getting a sense of what is working for them, what excites them, what frustrates them about the experience. You can really glean a lot from what they tell you in that process. And then one other option you have is online surveys. This one is probably the least personal in the sense that you can send it to, like, thousands of people. And, you know, you don't actually have to talk to anyone on the phone or on a Zoom call. But you can reach a large number of people, a really big audience. So if you have some kind of question like, what is the most important thing, most important criteria that you consider when you're booking your trip, can you stack rank them one through eight? This kind of question is pretty useful in an online survey because it's helpful to have, you know, 100 people answer it as opposed to just like six or 10. You can get a really large volume and have more confidence in the results. Whereas with interviews and task analysis, you actually have to schedule time with people one on one. So you probably won't get more than 10 participants. So you went ahead, you design and implement your study. What's next? Analyzing the data. Okay. Well, when you're analyzing qualitative data, it's important that you look for key patterns and themes. So, for example, with the sleep sack, I'm sure that they noticed that all parents mentioned at some point, infants were breaking out of their regular cough swaddles when they were designing the sleep sack, which actually has a velcro and really keeps the infants bundled in. This funny example that I have here is if you're studying a particular solution, you might notice in this example that there's probably some confusion around whether the cancel button is canceling the action or canceling your subscription. So this is something that you will know and understand through that task analysis. So kind of look through all the different feedback that customers are giving and look for those high level themes. It could be helpful to do this with someone, maybe, you know, work with another engineer or work with a designer. Just get another person on the team to do this with you so that you can be sure that it's not only your perception of the data. And finally, share your findings and next steps. This is really important. Maybe get all the information, do all the analysis and be ready to put your, you know, product pitch together and get the engineering team together and just start building. Well, it's really important for you to pause, report these out to the rest of the organization, maybe even do a meeting where you present the information as well. The whole company can value from this research. Maybe there's some other project that someone was doing in another part of the organization and they would find value in this research. It's important that you're recorded because there could be some other projects down the line, maybe next year, that can find value in this research. And also, if you notice that this type of research in this data has galvanized the team for its action, just imagine what it could do if you share it out more broadly and more widely. So it's really important that you take the time to do that. And that's all I have for you today. Just a really quick intro to user research, how you can use it in your company, some simple methods. I hope you find this valuable. Thank you.