Optimize your customer insights

Been thinking about customer insight velocity a lot recently. How do you optimize to have high velocity + high quantity customer insights funneling to inform product decision making.

Note: I define a strong insights funnel as

• “deliberate not random” ;
• “consistent and not sporadic” ;
• “atomic and not overhead” ;

I went back to basics, to focus on 6 key actions that can help you run a well oiled insights funnel :

• Drive clear alignment around product strategy and outcomes (short term and long term) — helping teams to easily identify who to talk to, when to talk to and what to discover. Accelerates both broader discovery (moonshots, new ideas etc.) as well as shorter term discovery (prototype feedback, early testing etc.)
• Train, train , train yourself — improve the quality of outcomes from each discovery through deliberate practice. Refine your approach consistently.
• Ensure direct access to customers — remove gatekeeping processes/teams. Anyone from your core product team (engineering, design, product) should be able to reach out without jumping through hoops.
• Build self serve / ready to access relevant data — information that helps you discover/define/filter attributes of your target segment and reach out to them (product usage metrics, contact information etc.)
• Do not rely on doing it all yourselves. Design a well-oiled collaboration rhythm and build processes for second order feedback > where product teams can listen , shadow or engage sales, product marketing, Customer support etc. Not a replacement for direct conversations but very helpful for scaling your insights. (specially in b2b, shadowing or leading sales meetings is an accelerator)
• Zero Effort interviewing — Use products when needed in your funnel > identify where highest work is and use the right tools (great tools exist that can help all the way from recruiting, to making contact, scheduling, payouts, recordings etc.)
• Finally, always have your quantitative insights ready to augment your findings — user funnels, clickmaps, browsing sessions etc. (warrants a whole different post)