At the heart of a product manager's responsibilities is ensuring that your team delivers the right product to your users. As such, product managers need to have a deep understanding of their users.

Problem Space vs Solution Space

It might seem natural to begin the product development process by thinking of solutions based on gut feelings or your own experiences. It is important to instead start by developing a deep understanding of the problem.

Problem Space

“What” the product needed to accomplish for customers is problem space. The “what” describes the benefits product should give to the target customer.

Solution Space

Whereas, “how” the product would accomplish it, is solution space. The “how” is the way in which the product delivers the “what” to target customer. The “how” is the design of the product and the specific technology used to implement the product.

Product development starts with talking to customers to understand their needs, as well as what they like and don’t like about existing solutions.

Customer Interviews

Customer interviews dig into a layer of qualitative information that product analytics can’t. It’s a user research method with a very clear aim: to answer why and how your users use your product. It’s one of the holy tenets of product management: the more a PM talks to her customers, the deeper her understanding of the problems they face.

Always start with a hypothesis.

Before doing any kind of user research (customer interviews, in this case), product managers need a thesis or a hypothesis. The main goal of asking customer interview questions is to validate or invalidate a specific problem identified by observing product analytics and unprompted customer feedback.

The goal of these customer interviews is to find out what your user’s top pain points really are, so it’s important to keep an open mind and consider the possibility that the initial assumption or hypothesis of the problem is wrong.

Use the 5 whys

It’s hard for customers to talk about the specific benefits they require and their importance. Even if they do, it’s going to be very vague. Take Henry Ford’s famous quote as an example: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” It’s therefore up to the product team to understand these requirements and define the problem space.

A common technique for this is the 5 whys, originally developed by Toyota: don’t stop after the first answer, just keep on asking why. Each time you ask why you get one step closer to the heart of the issue.

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