Module 3: Identifying Opportunities

and Crafting Strategies

Product Management Career Accelerator Program
 Product Development Lifecycle - 0 to 1

Identify market and

strategy
1. What industry will we operate in?
2. What market will we go after?
3. What will be our product strategy?

Ship and learn

00
1. How do we get to market?
2. What have we learnt from the launch?
3. Have we reached success?
05
Identify user problem
1. What user problem are we solving?
2. Is it the right problem to solve for
the company? 01
01 04
3. Is it worth solving this problem?
What is User Research
● What is user research?
○ The practice of studying users to generate insights about their needs
● Why do we need to do user research?
○ To understand our users better so we can build usable products that people
actually want
● How do we perform user research?
○ User research is not a one time process and occurs continuously across the
PDLC
● What are the types of user research?
○ Broadly speaking you can perform generative or evaluative user research
○ Generative research focuses on uncovering new opportunities
○ Evaluative research focuses on evaluating ideas
Continuous User Research

Generative research Evaluative research

Discover user needs, Evaluate solutions,

problems, opportunities concepts, products
Generative Research

User
interviews Focus
Group
Discussions

Surveys
Diary Ethnographic
studies research

Primary research
Research
User needs
enquiry Secondary research

Consumer Industry
behavior landscape
reports reports Market
research
reports

Technology
User trend
research reports
reports
Research enquiry
● A research enquiry is the scoped research question that you want to pursue
● For generative research, it can include the purpose, the research
methodology, and the target user who you want to research
● For example, a research enquiry could be - “Identify the unique movie
watching needs of the multilingual Indian audience”.
Secondary research
● Performing secondary research lets you leverage existing research
● Primary research is expensive and time consuming, so leverage secondary
research as much as possible
● Secondary research also lets you identify broad insights that can then be fine
tuned using primary research
● Popular sources of market/industry/user research reports
○ Gartner, Forrester, IDC, MarketsAndMarkets
Primary research
● Primary research allows you to connect directly with the customer
● It is a great source of authentic and personal insights
● There are various methods of performing primary research
○ User interviews, focus groups, surveys, ethnographic research, diary
studies
User Interviews
Recruit participants that
belong to the target segment
using screeners
Recruit
participants

Conduct the Synthesize

interview the learnings

Create a
A 30-60 min live moderated Distill the learnings from the
discussion
session that may be recorded interviews and create a report
guide

Create a discussion guide that

will the structure for the
interview
User Interviews - Recruiting participants
● Identify the target segment
○ If you have already done an STP analysis, you should have a target
segment in mind. Otherwise go with a broad user segment.
○ Identify the key traits of the target user
● Create a screener
○ Create a set of questions using which you can screen the participants
○ Leverage a service like UserTesting.com or UX research vendors to
recruit participants
● Decide the number of interviews
○ A smaller number of users (5-10) works for a qualitative study
○ You can stop once you see no new insights coming from interviews
User Interviews - Recruiting participants - OTT example
● Identify the target segment
○ Living in a tier 1 city, Genz/Millenial, who enjoys watching local movies
● Create a screener
○ Q1: Which of these languages can you understand (Proceed only if one or more
regional languages are selected)
■ Language 1
■ Language 2
■ Etc.
○ Q2: How many movies have you watched in the last one month? (Proceed only if 2+)
■ 0-1
■ 2-5
■ 5+
○ Etc.
User Interviews - Discussion Guide
● Get to know the participant well
○ Ask enough questions about their background. Understand who they are, what they do, what a typical
day in their life looks like.
● Keep the interview conversational
○ It’s recommended to keep a script but use it as a guide
● Ask open ended questions
○ For example, instead of asking “Do you have a full time job”, ask “What do you do for work”
● Don’t ask leading questions
○ For example, instead of asking “Would you like to make payments on WhatsApp”, ask “How do you feel
about making payments on WhatsApp”. Asking the former will bias the participant to say yes.
● Make room for follow up questions
○ For example, don’t stop after asking a question like “Do you like using WhatsApp”, follow up with “What
do you like about using WhatsApp”
● Avoid hypothetical questions
○ For example instead of asking “Imagine you could do X…”, ask “Let’s go back to the last time you did
X…”
User Interviews - Discussion Guide - OTT example
● Questions to know the participant
○ Tell me about yourself? Who are you? Who do you live with? What do you do for work? What
do you do for fun? What did you do last weekend? Walk me through a typical day in your life.
● Questions to set the context
○ When was the last time you watched something on an OTT platform? How often do you
watch? Who do you watch with?
● Questions to dig in
○ What are your favorite type of shows you watch on an OTT platform? Can you give some
examples? Walk me through the entire journey of how you choose a show and watch it.
○ What do you think about movies created in your regional language? When was the last time
you watched one? Why did you choose that movie over other options? What do you like or not
like about them? What do you think separates them from other types of movies?
User Interviews - Conduct the interview
● Record the session and take notes
○ Transcribing the entire session is preferrable
● Make the participant comfortable
○ If the participant does not feel comfortable, they will not give you true insights
○ Start with the easy general questions to warm them up
● Keep the interview conversational
○ Know when to drift away from the discussion guide and when not to
○ Probe deeper into the participant’s answers to understand why they’re saying
what they’re saying
○ Give the participant ample time to think but ask them to speak their mind
● Wrap up the interview and thank the participant for their time
Challenges with user interviews
● Participants may not always do what they say
○ Understand when this is happening and probe the user to talk about things
they’ve done as opposed to what they’d do
○ If this is turning into a big problem for your scenario, rely more on field studies
● Participants may feel obliged to say good things or come across as useful
○ Remind the participant that it’s not helpful if they’re unnecessarily nice to you
● Participants may leave out important things that they feel are trivial
○ Frame your questions in a way that forces them to go through all the details
● Not all participants are equally forthcoming
○ Try to remove such participants during screening
○ If this is a recurring problem, try using focus groups as participants tend to be
more comfortable in a group setting
User Interviews - Share a report
● Create a report that summarizes all the insights observed
○ This report can be shared with the wider stakeholders and will be useful
for alignment later on
● An insight is a takeaway that could influence the eventual product
○ For example, in the research to identify the unique movie watching
needs of the multilingual Indian audience, an insight could be that all
participants keep subtitles on while watching movies
○ Insights framed as needs or jobs-to-be-done are easily consumable
● Sometimes developing an insight might require triangulating more
information from multiple sources, observing correlations, and coming up
with hypotheses
User Interviews - Synthesize the learnings
● Synthesizing the learnings involves converting the raw interview notes to
actionable insights
○ A lot of information from the user interviews will be superfluous
○ Distill the information so that the common patterns stay
● Create a report that can be shared or presented
○ The report should have the takeaways but should also allow
stakeholders to see the raw information
○ This report is valuable for alignment later on
User Interviews - Synthesize the learnings
● What are the major patterns and common themes?
● What were the surprising findings?
● What hypotheses/assumptions were invalidated and validated?
● What interesting stories emerged from the responses?
● What values are most important to these users?
● What were the identifiable traits of these users?
● What were the key needs or jobs-to-be-done for the users?
● How are these users different from other users?
Glossary
● Generative research: Generative research is a type of research method that is used to generate new ideas, concepts, and theories. This can be done through a
variety of techniques such as brainstorming, focus groups, interviews, and surveys. The goal of generative research is to uncover new insights and understanding
about a particular topic or problem, and to generate new ideas for solving that problem.

● Evaluative research: Evaluative research is a type of research method that is used to assess the effectiveness or value of a particular program, product, or policy.
This can be done through a variety of techniques such as experiments, surveys, case studies, and observational studies. The goal of evaluative research is to
determine the strengths and weaknesses of a particular intervention or program, and to identify areas for improvement

● Ethnographic research: Ethnographic research is a type of qualitative research method that involves studying and understanding a particular culture, group, or
community through in-depth observation and participation.

● Qualitative research: Qualitative research is a type of research method that focuses on understanding the experiences, perceptions, and behaviors of people
through the collection and analysis of non-numerical data, such as words, images, and observations.

● Quantitative research: Quantitative research is a type of research method that focuses on collecting and analyzing numerical data, in order to understand and
explain the subject matter. The goal of quantitative research is to identify patterns, relationships, and trends in the data and to test hypotheses or theories that
have been developed.

● Screener: A screener is a tool used in research to identify and select a specific group of participants who meet certain criteria for a study. Screeners are often used
in qualitative research, such as focus groups or in-depth interviews, to ensure that the participants are representative of the population of interest.

● Discussion guide: A discussion guide is a document that is used to structure and guide a focus group or in-depth interview. It contains a set of questions or
prompts that are used to elicit information and opinions from the participants. The purpose of a discussion guide is to ensure that the conversation stays on topic
and that the researcher obtains the information they need to answer their research question. Sample discussion guide.