Product Research Assignment: Generative User Researcher

Success looks like:

• Research initiatives and insights have a meaningful and consistent impact on how decisions are made, both within and outside of Product.
• Understand potential customers and current customers that fall into the ideal customer profile dictated by the company/market strategy. Success is understanding these customers better than anyone.

Feedback loop/deliverables

• Creation of investment canvases, specifically the evidence section

Details:

• You’ll notice that much of the language being used comes from the double diamond style of thinking. We build software to solve real problems for real people. The first step in doing that is having a deep understanding of the problem we are trying to solve and the context of those that are trying to make progress. Defining the Why.

Relevant excerpt for illustration

• This excerpt from the book Inspired illustrates a useful take on research as an important part of the prod dev process:

... when we talk about how we do product discover, we are continuously doing two kinds of rapid learning and experimentation. One kind of learning is qualitative, and the other is quantitative.

Especially with the qualitative learning, some of our research is generative, which is understanding the problems we need to solve; and some of our research is evaluative, which is assessing how well our solution solves the problem.

User researchers are trained in this range of qualitative techniques (and some of them are also trained on the quantitative techniques as well). They can help you find the right type of users, craft the right types of tests, and learn the most from each user or customer interaction.

The key to tapping into the real value that these user researchers can provide is to keep in mind that the learning must be shared learning.

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• This excerpt from a blog post illustrates the difference between evaluative and generative research:

The goals of generative and evaluative research are very different.

• Generative research helps you define the problem you’d like to design a solution for.
• Evaluative research evaluates an existing design (in prototype form or in final form).