Knowing your Customers, Seeking Evidence and Sticking up for Continuous Discovery (with Hope Gurion, Product Leader and Team Coach @ Fearless Product)
Apr 7, 2024
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Seasoned product coach Hope Gurion discusses the importance of knowing your customers, seeking evidence, and the balance between confidence and data-driven decisions. She emphasizes the challenges faced by product leaders without a background in product, the significance of defining target customers, and the value of collaboration in product development. Gurion also explores applying poker principles to decision-making and navigating transformation hurdles in leadership.
Product coaching empowers leaders by identifying weaknesses and providing actionable advice.
Defining target customers' key attributes aids in making informed product decisions.
Evidence-based decision-making is crucial for product success and avoiding overconfidence.
Deep dives
Focus on Helping First-Time Product Leaders
The company, founded by the guest Hope Goryon, focuses on helping first-time product leaders navigate their roles effectively. Hope targets individuals who come from non-product backgrounds and find themselves leading product teams without prior experience. The company aims to support these leaders in understanding their job requirements, avoiding common mistakes through guidance, and learning from experienced product coaches.
Not Just for Novice Product Leaders
While the company primarily assists first-time product leaders from diverse backgrounds such as engineering, design, and marketing, there are instances where experienced product leaders seek coaching. The main focus remains on empowering leaders to establish credibility within their teams, make informed decisions, structure their teams effectively, and navigate executive-level trade-offs successfully.
Mindset Over Function
In the coaching process, the individual's mindset plays a pivotal role rather than their specific function. Those open to seeking guidance and recognizing potential gaps in their knowledge and experience are more likely to benefit from coaching services. The emphasis lies on helping individuals overcome challenges, gain team credibility, make strategic decisions, and align with their executive team.
Importance of Identifying the Customer
A critical aspect in product strategy involves identifying and understanding the target customer. Defining clear characteristics and attributes of the customer segment enables effective decision-making by product teams. The process emphasizes focusing on a specific customer group to gather actionable insights, calibrate decisions, and drive product success, particularly in scenarios where numerous customer segments exist.
Significance of Evidence in Decision-Making
Evidence-based decision-making fuels confidence among teams and mitigates reliance on personal viewpoints or unwarranted certainty. The guest stresses the importance of measurable and observable evidence derived from customer interactions, product usage data, and qualitative and quantitative analysis. Solid evidence guides product teams in making informed decisions, avoiding bias, and aligning product strategies with customer needs and market demands.
Balancing Speed with User Experience
The narrative suggesting a conflict between product managers and user researchers regarding speed versus user experience highlights broader discussions in the industry. While prioritizing speed and continuous discovery, teams must ensure they do not compromise user experiences or inadvertently create negative impacts for customers. Striking a balance between agility in decision-making and maintaining user-centricity remains crucial to delivering impactful and customer-focused products.
Hope Gurion is a seasoned product coach and one of Marty Cagan's recommendations from his new book, "Transformed". Hope also works closely with Teresa Torres, teaching continuous discovery, as well as working directly with incoming product leaders to help them make an impact in their organisations. We spoke all about knowing your customers, gathering evidence, and whether continuous discovery is really a threat to user researchers.
Episode highlights:
1. Product coaching is more than just being there to ask good questions
When working with incoming product leaders, potentially without a product background at all, it's important to have a coach who has product experience who can help you identify your weaknesses, assess the state of play and provide actionable advice. Ultimately, it's important to empower the coachee.
2. It's really hard to make decisions if you have no idea who your customers are
It's important to define who your target customer is and what are their key attributes. This could be demographics, firmographics or whatever characteristics you need to know who you most need to learn from to calibrate your decisions as a product team. But, too many product teams end up resorting to proxies in other functions who "know the customers".
3. Many leaders are overconfident, but evidence is everything
Some people are just naturally confident about everything and can react badly if their ideas are challenged. But, as product people, we absolutely need to look beyond innate confidence and work out what informed the perspective. Which customers are we basing it on? Can I speak to some of those customers? It's not about trashing people's ideas but moving forward with confidence.
4. It's important to get comfortable with making bets and understanding the difference between one-way and two-way-door decisions
Sometimes teams get stuck into cycles of trying to do "perfect research", possibly because they're afraid that they're only going to get one shot at it. This means that they end up not making any moves at all, and everyone ends up getting frustrated at the amount of time product teams take to do anything.
5. Continuous discovery is about removing as many blind spots as possible and probably isn't responsible for mass user research lay-offs
All teams have an imperfect understanding of their product, the pain points associated with their product and their customers. Continuous discovery helps address this by removing blind spots but doesn't aim for perfection - simply evidence about how to make your next move. Is it contributing to user researcher lay-offs? It feels difficult to argue this when it feels like the majority of companies don't do any user research in the first place. User researchers and continuous discovery can co-exist.
