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How to find the biggest unanswered question

And how you, as the Product Manager, can find an answer

In a previous post I went over how to prioritize features. But one thing that I glanced pretty quickly over, was how to always know, which questions are the most important to answer.

To be honest, it was because I hadn’t really thought that much about it — but now I have! So let’s get in to it!

What they present is a compelling case for why you should use one question to guide all of your efforts when trying to measure product-market-fit. The question is:

The answer to this question will tell you a lot. The users that answers ‘Very disappointed’ is going to tell you the few things that you have done really good. And more importantly they can tell you who they are!

Yes, that’s right! You don’t have to go around and talk to random people, and try to find some that fits your persona. Instead the people that love you can tell you who they are.

In order to get this data, we will also have to ask them these questions:

The first thing you should do is set up the form on your website. If you are using Hubspot (Which I think you should), it can be done in 3 minutes. Let me know if you need a guide on this.

If you don’t use Hubspot, find a way to get these four questions in front of a lot of customers.

Just do something like show a pop up on the website with a small text and a CTA. When clicking the button, open up the form in a new tab.

Now that you have collected some data, it’s time to take a look!

First of all, notice how many people answered ‘Very disappointed’. In the long run, we want this number to go up.

But for now, look at the responses from the disappointed users. Specially look at what they answer to question 2. Even though we ask them to describe “the type of person that would get the most benefit from the product”, we know that this type of person is just like them! Because they would be very disappointed if they couldn’t use our product anymore.

So there you have it — your personas! Grab a pen and paper, and see if you can find the similarities between the disappointed users.

And after you have done this, look at their answer to question 3; the main benefit they gain from your product. You most likely have 100 features, but there’s a chance that 80% of your customers will tell you the same 20% of your features. And it’s probably even less.

In the original article, they found that their users loved the speed the most. When I ran the test, I found that people liked how professional they looked on our platform.

So go ahead and find out why people love your product! And write that stuff down in as much detail as you can. Why do they love this feature? Which job do they become amazing at because of your product? Why does it mean a lot to them, to become amazing at this thing?

Now that we have our personas nailed, it’s time to talk about love.

You will already know why people love your product by now.

But now let’s talk about what hold people back from loving your product. But let’s not look at the answers from the people that answered ‘Not disappointed’. These users are a lost cause. It does not matter what you do, you will never win these people over. So instead, let’s look at what the ‘Somewhat disappointed’ users looked like. And we’ll start out with what they love about you.

Some of these users will say that the main benefit they get from your product is the same as the not disappointed users. These are the most exciting to us, since they already love our main feature.

But the people that say that their main benefit is something totally different from our main feature, will be disregarded as well. We’ll only focus on the users that are falling in love with our main offering, because those are the users we will focus on in the future.

Now, look at these users’ answer to what holds them back from loving you. You will most likely find that 80% of the answers contain 20% of the same issues. Meaning, people will say the same things over and over again.

I opened this article with promising you would be able to find your biggest unanswered questions. This is where we get to this part.

After completing step 1 and 2, you will have a good idea of why people love you, and also what you can do to make more people love you.

After looking at these two lists of things, you are now ready to organize them.

What you are looking for here, is the stuff you cannot explain.

From your list of the things people love about you, go through these questions:

If you answer no to any of these questions, you know what to figure out. You need to go talk to real users, and find out why it is that they love this so much. Which problem is it solving?

This will inform you about the users and make you reevaluate your product vision. Is your product actually solving some other problem that you didn’t know it could solve?

If so — great! Most products don’t solve any problems. But you’ll need to figure out if it actually is a problem you want to solve. Or is this preventing you from solving the real problem? In 9/10 cases, you should just double down on the problem you accidently solved.

Similarly look at the list of reasons why people don’t love you, and say:

Asking these questions, will give you a lot of clarity. And if you are like me, you will think that it is surprising that people find some of these things frustration. And if that is the case, you need to go talk to them!

Why is this task difficult to accomplish? Why isn’t it intuitive? Why does it not live up to your expectations?

Why do you think it would be a good idea to have a Linux desktop app? Or to also support imports of RSS feeds? Or have a offline mode?

When you understand your customer, you will understand how you can help them. And when you understand how you can help them, you have a great product vision. And when you have that, well, then you know if this is a product you want to pursue.

Finally, we are ready to make our feature list.

It’s important to both keep doing what people find attractive about us. If it’s convenience, make it even more convenient. If it’s speed, make it even more faster!

But more importantly, look at the list of questions you have posted in step 3. Hopefully you have the answer to some of them. And you should start implementing some of the features that you have found you need. Some of them will be no-brains, but other will require some discovery work. Do this as well.

And when in doubt, ask yourself: “If I am optimizing for learning, what is the next experiment I should run?”. Find the experiment that will teach you more than all of the others combined.

Today we went through my take on the amazing Superhuman article. We learned how to find the biggest pain points for our users, and also how to make a precise persona — in way less time than other methods.

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