How do you talk to your users
How important is talking to my users? Shouldn’t I rather spend time on developing the product and delegate that task to someone else? Well, in this article we will talk about all the ways you should communicate with your users and why this is so important.
When you are the CEO of a startup or any company as a matter of fact, your agenda gets pretty crowded, often too crowded. You are responsible for everything and sometimes you just want to outsource some of your already piled up tasks. That’s logical, that’s okay. As you already know, you have to be careful on which tasks you delegate and which you will make sure that is done your way, your way.
Well, this is one task you really don’t want to delegate, you want to do this yourself. I may be a struggle to find time for it, but it’s extremely important. Communicating with your users should be your main source of information regarding product development. But while you’re at it, you want to avoid these mistakes:
- Not listening enough
It’s normal that all you want to do is pitch your solution, new features and present it to users while you are talking to them. That’s in your nature (and it should be)! But, when you communicate with your users, try to listen. Just listen. Let them open to you and listen to all they have to say, that’s extremely valuable information.
- Asking hypothetical questions
“If we build this feature, how would you feel about our product?” If you ask these kinds of questions to your audience, what are they thinking about? About your current product or about some imaginary upgraded version of your product that does not exist? Avoid making these questions. Let your users focus on what they are using now and let them give you feedback on that rather then influencing them with your ideas. Try to guide the conversations into any unadressed problems your users may have. Let them bring the ideas for the new features to you. It sholdnt be done other way around.
- Talking to potential users
Your user's problem didn’t appear all of a sudden. A series of other events and circumstances led them to having that problem. Show great interest in that. That way you can see the bigger picture and have much more context. First, you must know that you don’t need to talk to thousands of people. Dozens of carefully selected potential or exsisting users shold be more then engoht.
Other than the usual method of calling your users and emailing them to set up online meets, you can attend various industry events where your ideal users will be concentrated. This are usually a pretty good spots for you to talk to a big number of people and capture as much information as you can. Keep it casual, like you’re running a simple conversation with someone.
Another option may be to show up in person at their bussines location. For example, imagine you have built some sort of a solution for restaurants. Wouldn’t showing up at various restaurants and directly talking to the workers, manager and the owner give you valuable first hand feedback? And, yes, first off it sounds a bit weird because it might feel like you are imposing something on the people you showed up to, but this is definitely an option you should consider, and it can be very valuable if done right. You just just need to be respectfull of peopls time and truly be interested in helping them solve a potential problem they might have. You dont want to be pushy or stear the conversations with a preconception of the solutions you have or the solution you are planing to build.
Users that are facing that problem often can give you valuable information that can help you realize how much of a priority that is for them. If you don’t want to be looking at plain data after those interviews, as I’m sure you don’t, ask users for their contact info. That way if you are stuck with one specific situation, you can contact the user directly if based on his interview you see that he can help you.
- Getting real feedback
Very important thing is to find ways to get real sincere feedback. You want to see the things how they really are and you dont want feedback based on what you would like to hear. Make sure that all the user feedback activites and interviews are unbiased and that you are not leading the users into any kind of direction. That is the only way to get real feedback.
Communication with your users is as important as any other task regarding developing and upgrading your product. Take advantage of any opportunity where you can get customer feedback, and do it in a way where you collect real, meaningful data. This is something you definitely should give much attention to.
