Conducting thorough market research, including a PESTEL analysis and competitive analysis, is paramount before defining a strategy for any business. These analyses provide essential insights into the external factors influencing the market, enabling businesses to understand the broader landscape, identify potential opportunities, and mitigate risks effectively.

Understanding Market Dynamics: Market research allows businesses to comprehend the dynamics of the environment in which they operate. A PESTEL analysis (examining Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental, and Legal factors) provides a comprehensive view of the external forces shaping the industry. This understanding is crucial in adapting strategies to align with the prevailing conditions and anticipating changes that may impact the business.

Identifying Opportunities and Threats: A competitive analysis helps in understanding the strengths and weaknesses of competitors, unveiling market trends, and identifying opportunities and threats. By evaluating the competitive landscape, businesses can position themselves strategically, capitalize on gaps in the market, and proactively address challenges.

Risk Mitigation: Market research serves as a risk mitigation tool. By uncovering potential challenges and threats through systematic analyses, businesses can develop contingency plans and strategies to navigate uncertainties. This proactive approach enhances resilience and equips the organization to respond effectively to unforeseen circumstances.

Informed Decision-Making: Informed decision-making is a cornerstone of successful strategies. Through market research, businesses gain a data-driven foundation that supports decision-making processes. This ensures that strategic choices are based on a solid understanding of market realities, minimizing the likelihood of costly mistakes.

Staying Current: The business landscape is dynamic, with changes occurring rapidly. Regular market research is essential for staying up-to-date with evolving trends, consumer behaviors, and industry advancements. Continuous monitoring allows businesses to adapt their strategies in real-time, ensuring they remain agile and responsive to emerging opportunities or challenges.

In conclusion, market research, including PESTEL and competitive analyses, is indispensable for any organization aiming to develop a robust and adaptive strategy. The insights gained from these analyses not only inform strategic decisions but also empower businesses to stay ahead of the curve and thrive in an ever-changing market environment.

In today’s business landscape, understanding your audience is the key to unlocking growth and engagement. Specially for product and marketing teams.

One powerful tool that can elevate your marketing strategy is market segmentation.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll delve into what segmentation is, why it matters, and how to effectively implement it for optimal results. Market segmentation is the process of dividing a heterogeneous market into distinct and homogenous segments based on various criteria. These criteria can include demographics, psychographics, behavioral patterns, and geographic locations.  The goal is to identify groups with similar characteristics and needs to tailor marketing strategies accordingly.

One effective tool to help you understand and empathize with your buyer or user is the creation of user personas.

These fictional characters represent your ideal customers, providing a deep insight into their needs, preferences, and behaviors. Aligning your strategies with these personas can be a game-changer for businesses aiming to deliver personalized and impactful experiences.

Let’s delve into the process of creating a persona and explore how to leverage it for success.

To create a user persona, spend time doing research.

Here is the type of information you need to find.

• Define general demographic and characteristics of your segment to better choose what will be the age, location, attitude, lifestyle of this ideal customer.
• What are people saying about the problem or pain? What do they know? What don’t they know?
• Define other things like brands they use, people they follow on social media, etc.

Once you have a user persona created for each of your segments, you can better discuss ideas, marketing strategies, product opportunities that are ultimately aligned with who your user is. It’s a way to think about your users and buyer personas in a way that brings proximity and empathy to the process as they stop being this big market segment and become a person with fears, daily struggles, dreams, needs, etc. A user persona is a holistic approach to understanding and serving your audience better.

In this video, We will guide you through a fundamental research workflow essential for defining your product strategy.

While the provided steps serve as a foundation, feel free to tailor or expand them to suit your needs. Let’s dive in!

1. Define the Purpose: Start with a clear purpose for your research initiative. Outline the unknowns, assumptions, and hypotheses. Ensure your efforts have a defined objective.

2. Assess Current Insights: Gather holistic information about your brand or product. Use sticky notes to organize various insights, including user reviews, team feedback, and market data.

3. Define the Problem: Delve deeper into the identified unknowns. Ask critical “why” questions to thoroughly understand the problem you aim to solve.

4. Analyze Data: Examine existing data, highlighting trends, improvements, or concerning patterns. Align this data with market trends and behaviors to gain meaningful insights.

5. Identify Assumptions: List assumptions on sticky notes, prioritizing them based on importance. Revisit and update assumptions as your research progresses.

6. Formulate Research Questions: Translate assumptions into questions. Focus on queries directly tied to your research goal. Ensure they guide your research methods and serve as success indicators.

Leading user interviews isn’t as easy as it looks. Here are the things that will make you a better designer or product manager and the actions you have to take to keep all the information gathered during a user interview in a way that is transferable to other team members.

During this post we will discuss:

1. How to prepare for a user interview
2. How to take notes — how to organize notes for future product features
3. How to run async user interviews

How to Prepare for a User Interview

If you find yourself leading user interviews, it’s because you’re seeking answers. Yet, amidst this pursuit, it’s easy to fall into the trap of assumptions.

Preparing for a user interview requires a strategic approach.

If you are sure that user interviews are the best way for you to gather the insights you need and you have already consider other alternatives, then you have to really define the right questions. To do that, you have to do 3 key things.

We call it the OUSS User Interview Framework.

• Objective: Define the main objective of your research. By the end of the research, what should you know that you don’t know now (and there is no other way for you to know)?
• Unknowns: Define the assumptions you are making and the unknowns. Create a list.
• The Sh*t Sandwich: What questions can you ask to evaluate how much they really “want,” “think,” “believe” something, and what are they willing to sacrifice for?

The Objective:

Define the main objective of your user interviews. The objective should be specific and help the team understand why this is important for the team. Avoid objectives like “I want to understand the user more” — What about it? Just you? Does the team understand the user? If yes, then ask them to transfer that knowledge.

The Unknowns:

Create a list of unknowns and assumptions you are making. Start by typing all the unknowns and then from those knowns, define the type of assumptions you or your team are making.

Once you have done this work, you have to add the questions that will help you get deeper into user wants and needs using the sh*t sandwich thinking model.

The sh*t sandwich:

This model says when you offer something new to people they are very likely to say yes. The problem in product, marketing, and design is that during interviews we tend to ask questions like “would you like to…” “from one to 10 how likely are you to…” and because most people will very likely “want” that, you as a designer, marketer, or product manager go back and prioritize that on your roadmap. It misses the fact that the circumstances matter and that options do too. Like anything in life, your users have limitations in resources, time, etc., so make them ke choices, add additional questions to your question list that help you understand if the user would want something and will be willing to eat the shit sandwich, or in other words, the consequences of it. Would they want a new “feature” but would they pay more? Would they want a new feature but then Future B will be out of the table this year?

Sometimes it’s also asking questions to test and understand how much of the sh*t sandwich they are willing to “eat”and where is the limit.

How to take notes

Taking notes is the second most important aspect during user interviews or group interviews. You can be asking the right questions and uncovering great insights, but if you’re not taking notes properly, everything you’re doing could be a waste of time.

Remember the following:

• Take notes in real-time during the interview. If you’re unable to take notes while someone is talking, consider having someone else join you to take notes or record the interview.
• Record what they are saying…Note the exact words when they express something intriguing and capture their facial expressions. Are they excited, concerned, or do their expressions contradict their words?
• Document any references they make such as “I heard,” “I read,” “I saw,” or “Someone told me.” Follow up with additional questions to explore where they obtained this information, who relayed it to them, and what they believe.
• Record their belief systems, such as “I believe” or “I think.”
• Ensure that all notes are easily accessible. Every team member should have access to the user research interview folder. Each user interview should be categorized by user segment or persona.
• Your notes should provide a comprehensive overview of the interview, eliminating unnecessary details. Other team members should be able to read your notes, offer feedback, grasp the key insights, and gain a better understanding of the user’s needs. If your notes are inaccessible or difficult to comprehend by others, there’s room for improvement.
• Identify the type of user, their level of influence, and their “purchasing power”.

Additionally, maintain a space where you can review all the questions asked and the corresponding answers, along with your interpretations. This ensures clarity and consistency in analyzing the interview data.

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The buyer’s journey is the process that a potential customer goes through from the initial awareness of a product or service to the final decision to make a purchase. It is often depicted as a series of stages that customers move through, and it helps businesses understand and address the needs of their audience at each step of the process, looking into potential blocker and pains.

The typical stages of the buyer’s journey are:

• Awareness Stage, when the buyer realizes they have a problem or a need. During this stage they start to research and become aware of possible solutions.
• Consideration Stage. The buyer defines their problem or need more precisely. They research and evaluate different solutions or approaches, and their search online becomes more specific.
• Decision Stage. The buyer is ready to make a decision. During this stage, they compare specific products or services, they look at reviews, they watch videos where other people share their experiences, etc. The goal is to make the final purchasing choice.

When using a buyer’s journey, consider the activities and channels that could enhance your assistance in guiding the potential buyer to the next stage. For instance, if they are in the decision-making phase, they might require access to product reviews, a comparison table, and additional information elucidating why your offering is distinct. Implementing a promotional strategy could potentially expedite their decision-making process.

Similarly, in the awareness stage, contemplate how you can aid them in comprehending the problem they are facing. Explore ways to build trust, ensuring that they assess and consider your solution in subsequent stages. How can you better assist them in understanding their problem, and what strategies can you employ to instill trust and encourage consideration of your solution in future stages?

Let’s go over each phase.

Discover

This phase focuses on collecting insights about user problems, identifying their pain points, finding alternative solutions, and seeking inspiration. It is the most raw phase where ideas do not need to be achievable but rather inspirational. It is a phase where everything is possible, and you are trying to understand what other companies are doing to solve the same problem.

The discovery phase often includes the following milestones:

1. Problem framing
2. Research Wall or/and Competitive analysis
3. Inspiration Wall: Examples, Inspiration, and Evidence Wall

While these milestones are usually sufficient during this phase, sometimes the problem is more complex or involves specific users who are not part of your mainstream user base. In such cases, you may need to spend more time defining the user persona, their pain points, and even the way they are currently solving the problem, for example, by creating a user journey.

By the end of this phase, the team needs to be able to identify their focus and the idea they want to work on or continue exploring.

Plan & Define

During this phase, you aim to define the initiative and establish how you will measure its success. You also need to create a list to keep track of the things you expect to learn and the results you anticipate by the end of the initiative. This phase includes the following milestones:

• Defining the epic or initiative by creating a brief or using an Initiative canvas.
• User criteria: Defining the type of users and the criteria they must meet to access the new feature or be part of the user group targeted by the marketing team’s ad campaigns. User criteria aim to identify in-depth those users who would be willing to use the new feature or product and are willing to pay for it. They may have specific demographics, lifestyle, etc. Ideally, it is easy to differentiate the ideal user from the anti-user. Both should appear very similar, but a few aspects should make one fit our criteria while the other one does not.
• Outlining the interactions that the team expects users to go through to complete their goals in your product by creating a user story map. To do this, the PM may have to create a user journey or storyboard to map out the way users are currently using the product and understand the key problems.
• User stories: Writing a general explanation of a software feature from the end user or customer’s perspective.
• Success metrics & MCS: Defining and visualizing success and providing information about the minimum criteria for success. 
• Minimum criteria for success (MCS): Give your experiments meaning by defining how much your product improvements will increase sales and evaluating the cost of building it versus the reward.

1. 1. 1. Cost of building: Developer time + Other co-workers + labour wages + advertising + opportunity cost.
      2. Expected reward: Increase in revenue? Increase in satisfaction? Increase in conversion rate? Increase in customer lifetime value? Is the reward bigger than the cost of building it?

• Sitemap: A sitemap is exactly what it sounds like – a map of your product. This is often essential because it will help you evaluate how many pages the new initiative or epic will touch and how a small change can affect other parts of the product. This is not always required, but it is often recommended to avoid missing potential risks.

Design

During the design phase, the design team will conduct multiple sessions to develop a solution. This may include a design sprint or a design session. The length of this process can vary depending on how complex the problem is and what constraints are present. However, it is often hindered by multiple levels of feedback loops and approvals.

The design phase typically involves the following milestones:

• Empathy: The designer understands the problem and how the user or users will experience it. They will also spend time gathering information about the user if they feel like they are missing that information.
• Clarify: This is where the designer reframes the problem and works closely with the PM to update some of the documents they created and make concrete observations about the user. During this milestone, the designer may gather input from stakeholders, conduct user interviews or other types of research activities.
• Ideate: In this milestone, the designer explores multiple ideas and chooses one. It is essential that the designer identifies the design principles that will guide the ideation. During this milestone, the designer may work with other stakeholders, especially developers and product managers, to select the right solution.
• Prototype: Here, the designer combines all the learnings and works to define the solution and create a prototype. Ideally, the designer has gathered all the necessary information beforehand and does not need to collect feedback after this. This milestone can sometimes include testing.

Once the prototype and design packages are complete, the designer can share the resources with the development team to start the implementation phase.

Develop

This is the development phase, where you create a timeline, add bids, and monitor progress. Product managers may want to have a straightforward way of tracking progress on a weekly or daily basis, especially if there are specific delivery days (for example, if you work for an agency or a public company).

Product managers can track progress from developers in a variety of ways, including:

1. Daily or weekly stand-up meetings or async sessions: These are brief meetings (or async sessions) where each team member provides a quick update on their progress and any roadblocks they are facing.
2. Project management tools: Product managers can use project management software such as Jira, Trello, or Github to track deadlines and progress. This allows them to see what tasks are being worked on, who is working on them, and how much progress has been made.
3. Code reviews: Product managers can review the code that developers are writing to ensure that it meets the requirements and standards of the project.
4. Demos: Developers can provide demos of their work to product managers to show them the progress they have made and gather feedback.
5. Reports: Developers can provide progress reports to product managers to keep them informed of their progress and any issues they are facing. Personally, I had to track progress using reports because the developers were not always reliable. One of the things I asked them to do with me was to organize their tasks in the order they needed to complete them and add an estimate of how long each task would take (a bid). With that, I decided to create a weekly workload and progress report that I would use during our weekly standup meeting. Basically, I added all the tasks that needed to be done that week, took into account the developer’s workload, and marked them as completed during the standup meeting.

By using these methods, product managers can stay up-to-date on the progress of their development team and ensure that the project is moving forward according to schedule.

Iterate

During the product development phase or after the product has been launched, it’s important to test the solution and design and consider making small improvements to increase speed, reduce costs, increase user adoption, and ultimately achieve a higher return on investment. This process often takes place before launching.

As a result, sometimes an initiative may change, requiring the product manager to update user stories, success criteria, or even redesigns.

Strategy & Launch

The goal is to help derive market-based strategies and define the go-to-market strategy. The product manager (PM) is a prerequisite for a successful go-to-market plan, which includes formulating and delivering the correct market message and activities that will make the product succeed.

This phase includes the following milestones:

• Product Strategy: Define the high-level strategy for this feature or initiative and explore what type of strategy will be the right one for the product. The team may consider new market strategies, distribution strategies, price strategies, positioning strategies, or communication strategies.
• Go-to-Market Strategy: This milestone includes a product launch plan, a marketing plan, a customer maintenance plan, sales channel training and presentations, demos, trial versions, etc.

During this phase, the product manager may also consider developing a business plan or creating a business canvas and updating their value proposition for that product.

Ideally, the product manager should begin working on this phase simultaneously with the designer’s solution ideation process.

Measure

During this phase, you will:

1. Collect metrics
2. Monitor validated learnings
3. Decide on the next steps

Collect metrics and track validated learnings from the initiative. Monitor how the initiative has impacted the business, how users are interacting with it, and identify opportunities for maximizing return on investment. Assess the reward of building this feature or solution and evaluate its costs. Collaborate with sales and marketing teams to increase sales and gather feedback.

Ask yourself: 

• Do you want to maintain this feature? 
• Is it competitive enough? 
• Does it fit with our company vision? Do we need to improve it? 
• How many users will pay more or adopt this new feature if we improve it?

Product managers translate product strategy and customers’ needs into planned work — defining what the team will build and when it will be launched.

The product manager can be the one defining the plan but needs input from other team members, especially the developer, who will be the ones owning this work. 

Let’s go over the basic process and some of the details:

#1 Define your epic or initiative. Steps and Thinking Process.

Initiative or Epic Canvas (P.O.R Epic Canvas)

Discover this wonderful framework.

Here is the Step by step process:

Use case and users

The next step is to define the type of users or buyers that would be affected by this initiative. Identify them and note how they will be affected. Think about your team too.

Problem and user pain

Define the problem, but not in a superficial level, try to understand the root of the problem, where it starts, when it happens, what triggers it, and get into more details by defining the type of user pain and analyzing it even further. This will be very helpful for you to think about the solution, and for the marketing team to better communicate the benefits.

The solution

Once ready, you will be moving to the solution section. In here, you are defining the solution, the desired state and providing information about how you will measure success. All of that should be reflected here.

Risks & Assumptions

Then go back to risks and assumptions. Once here, you should be able to have all of them defined and you can start organizing them by adding at the top all the high risks ones. It’s key that you provide information about how you will mitigate risks and the type of research and findings you got that are helping you validate some of your assumptions.

Once ready you can move forward to defining all the details of the solution. Don’t be surprised if during this process you still have to go back to the assumptions section or revisit the risk section. It’s just normal.

User stories and requirements

In here, you will define the user stories and the requirements.

As a [type of user], I want to [perform some task] so that I can [achieve some goal]. Given [some context] when [some action is carried out] then [a set of observable outcomes should occur].

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What should you do when the initiative or epic seems complex?

User story mapping, a technique pioneered by Jeff Patton and now widely embraced in the tech industry for its ability to streamline communication, foster collaboration, and future–proofing designs and products.

User-story maps are powerful visualizations that help teams define, prioritize, and understand the scope of their product development efforts. By breaking down user interactions into manageable chunks, user story maps provide a holistic view of the user journey while also highlighting dependencies and priorities.

At its core, a user-story map comprises three main components:

1. Activities: These represent high-level tasks that users aim to accomplish within the digital product. Activities often translate into epics or initiatives and serve as overarching goals. For instance, “Create an account” could be an activity.
2. Steps: Sitting directly beneath activities, steps outline the sequential subtasks required to complete an activity. Steps provide a narrative structure to the user journey, making it easier to visualize the flow of interactions. For example, under the “Create an account” activity, steps might include “adding a name, email, and password”.
3. Details and requirements: At the lowest level of granularity, details describe specific interactions or requirements necessary to complete a step. These could include actions like “Enter username or email” and “Enter password” or “okay button” or even “a reset password link.”

How big or small an activity or step is will depend on what you are working on. Are you creating a user story to evaluate how your product can be in the future? Are you mapping your whole product? Or are you mapping a feature or how a user gets from A to B to achieve a goal? Don’t be too concerned about how big or small those activities need to be; it will come naturally the more you do it, and you will see that it changes based on the initiative you are mapping. At the end, what it should help is to have the overall key activities like user milestones, and then define the steps they have to take to move from milestone 1 to 2 considering all use cases, and then define the details and requirements.

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When a product team is about to launch a new feature, or even just changes in the product, they often need to think about what would be the strategy to ensure users are aware of those changes or that new feature so that they can get enough feedback or data to validate it.

Depending on the size of the organization this can be done by the Product manager and the designer, or with the collaboration of the marketing team or other team team members.

Either way the process includes some of the following concepts and that is why I am sharing this framework with you.

Looks like this. Watch the video below.

Good planning is essential for any product team. It is for this reason that a lot of product teams have a project or program manager helping plan development work. In spite of this, product planning is, by its nature, very volatile and uncertain. As a result, planning must be agile. This is one of the reasons why agile methodologies are often used in product teams.

KANBAN boards are often used by developers and other members of the product team to visualize their work. The KANBAN board helps teams visually identify where things are, limiting how much work is in progress. Developers use KANBAN boards to manage and deliver user stories and fix bugs that are in the “Next-to-do” or “Ready for Dev” column. Those tickets are usually picked and moved across the board to provide transparency and help the team track progress.

One of the objectives of using a KANBAN board is to optimize the process. It is important for program managers or product managers to track lead times and cycle times. The goal is to measure the average amount of time it takes for a ticket to move through the board. 

The KANBAN method was born in the 1940s in Japan by Taiichi Ohno, and today millions of organizations use it. And while KANBAN boards are extremely popular, you will often see teams using KANBAN boards and talking about sprints and daily scrums.

Teams often use hybrid methods that bring parts of scrum and KANBAN together, probably because both have roots in agile.

	KANBAN Board	Scrum
Key metrics	Cycle times. Productivity is measured by the cycle time of the complete project	Velocity. Productivity is measured by the number of story points
Collaborative process	Yes	Yes
Who it’s for	Teams working on ongoing tasks and projects	Short projects with some complex tasks
Flexibility	Highly flexible	Medium
How?	Task-based and visual boards	Sprints with specific goals and tasks
Asset delivery	Ongoing	At the end of each sprint
Roles	Roles are not as defined, and tasks are shared	Roles are defined (Product Owner, Scrum Master, Design team, and Development team). Requires a Scrum master.
Other	Flexible so projects can pivot depending on priorities. Boards can become very complex and confusing. Hard if you want to visualize when things are done.	Requires a lot of planning. Not as flexible for teams when priorities change mid-sprint. Easy to achieve quick wins to drive team motivation.

When introducing a new epic or initiative to developers, fostering productive discussions can be a challenge. While recognizing that every team is unique, many struggle to collect comprehensive feedback from developers and engage them effectively. Involving developers early in the ideation and design phase is crucial to prevent rework.

Here’s a recommended approach that has proven effective. Instead of synchronous meetings, start by sharing the epic, initiative, or design asynchronously.

This approach allows developers the time and space to contemplate the information at their convenience, promoting thoughtful consideration. Subsequent synchronous meetings can be scheduled if developers encounter challenges or have numerous questions.

Tools: ICE proposal / Design Proposal