Month: March 2016

Every customer call, no matter how mundane, can be a powerful opportunity to reconnect yourself and your development team to your customer. Outside of research calls where we get to show exciting new products, there can be many customer calls for things like hearing feedback from a frustrated customer to assisting with a tough sale. The bias may be to treat these as functional meetings, with the goal to end the call with as few action items as possible and get back to work. However, even though these calls aren’t exciting research calls, they still have a lot of value. By using some tricks to make exciting notes from these calls, we can make the call more informative and virtually bring the customer back with us to share with stakeholders and our Team. For a new Product Manager learning to take engaging notes is an important skill, and hopefully these techniques make it easier. Taking enhanced notes like this leads to a great first impression as well, especially if your development team typically has little customer interaction.

First, make your notes pop with visual elements. I like to include two main ones. First, if you’re a B2B product, grab a copy of the customer’s company’s logo off Google and include it at the top of the notes. This helps you and your Team remember that you’re working with real brands, and it’s very exciting when the logo is well-known. The second image I include is the customer’s face from LinkedIn. By inserting their profile picture, you reinforce that your customers are real people. It especially makes it more engaging for your Team or stakeholders who read your notes, and is an easy and unexpected addition. It seems like magic to them when you somehow got the customer’s picture from a phone call.

For the notes, they can be simple, but focus on a couple aspects. First, record any action items, to ensure you don’t forget to do any follow-up. The second is to capture the customer emotion and feedback. I like to be profuse in my note-taking, and later go back and highlight a couple items in particular that either have actionable feedback or are particularly powerful statements. Like an executive summary, they’re the two or three things I’d want my Team to read. It may be an emotional statement about the product, or a neat idea, or a workaround they’ve come up with. I look for items that will spark creativity in the Team and inspire compassion for the customer.

Be sure to save your notes in a searchable place. Google Drive is great, and you can make a folder that’s shared with your whole Team. I also like to put the date and customer name in the file name to identify them later. Be sure to notify the Team of the new notes too, as they will rarely proactively check Google Drive.

If you’re training a Product Manager or may be in the future, these notes will be a great resource for building their customer empathy and for reference when talking about why a feature was built.

I’ve been doing some research on performance testing, and found the excellent blog Web Performance Today. In particular, the post “You are the worst judge of your site’s performance. Here’s why.” was a great read. Product Managers are biased in judging performance, for the reasons explained in the article:

1. We have great tools, like Mac computers and the newest iPhones, that do better with poor product performance.
2. We’re too sympathetic to what it takes to make a fast site, and are willing to accept slow performance as we know how hard it is to make it fast.
3. We know how to work around slow performance by refreshing sites, closing other browser tabs, blocking ads, and other tricks.

Given the unsettling bias in our own judgement, there are ways to gain empathy and awareness of slow performance. With a new Product Manager, first it is important to make them aware of their bias. As users, we’re a small segment for most of our products, being early adopters and lovers of technology. We’re not the majority that will make our products cross the chasm. We must avoid letting personal bias substitute real user experience and feedback in our judgement of performance.

To help avoid our bias, here are some tricks to get a truer feel for your site’s performance:

1. Use a bad laptop for a day. Most Product Managers I’ve worked with use the latest Macs, which do a great job with websites and apps. Instead, leave your laptop at home one day, and get a loaner laptop from IT. You’ll likely get a PC several years old; the same type of PC your users have, that you can use to try your product.
2. Use a VM to access older browsers. Your dev team is likely already using VMs, and they or your IT team may be able to create an older Windows instance for you to use. It should have older IE, with the default privacy/performance settings, to give you a great taste for how the site feels. VMs typically also have bare-bones specs, or you can ask your team to make it lean by not provisioning many resources. If you’re feeling daring, you could even demo off the VM.
3. Use a slow connection. Go to a Starbucks, library, or public Wifi to avoid the speed from your work and home’s network. You may even be able to join one from your office depending on if you’re located next to stores.
4. Don’t multitask. Use your product, and don’t let yourself get distracted or look away while it loads. On one product I owned, a joke got started to sing “Loading Loading Loading” to the tune of Rawhide’s theme song whenever the loading spinner was shown. If you make yourself think or sing an annoying song while your product loads, you’ll feel the pain.

Of course, you should also have performance tracking and monitoring on your site, (Web Performance Today can tell you a lot more), but I’ve found numbers don’t make you really feel the pain. By making yourself see what it’s like for your customers, you gain empathy and remove your bias.