Insights template: the missing link between Designers and Product Managers
Earlier this week, talking to a Product Manager about qualitative and quantitative data she said “I’m more of a quantitative type of person. I guess in part is because I don’t get actionable data from Designers”.
Yesterday, during module 5 of my Product Design course, one of the attendees — a Designer — complained that “You bring user problems to the Product Managers and they don’t do anything. They don’t take action”.
When I asked him how he presented user insights he said “for instance, I tell the Product Manager that the menu isn’t working so people have a hard time finding things. But this doesn’t seem to be too big of an issue to the Product Manager”.
At that moment, I realized that the Insights template might be the missing link between Designers and Product Managers.
The very point of the Insights template is to turn user problems into business problems to make data actionable.
Part of the reason I created the Insights template is that many designers tend to offer their observations about pains users are experiencing with the product, but fail to express them in terms of business problems, so naturally, product people fail to realize how that impacts them directly.
An example
A Designer might express the user problem as “Clients complain about price inconsistency: the price shown on the app is different from the price charged”.
Stated like this, the Product Manager might not take action because this is competing with other problems they are trying to solve.
What’s missing here to make this observation actionable is how this impacts the business: “the price inconsistency is causing users to uninstall the app, leave low ratings and bad reviews in the Appstore. And this, in terms of product metrics, means increased churn, higher rate of uninstalls, and a negative effect on purchase intent and branding”.
With this second part the Product Manager will probably take this statement more seriously and take action, because churn and uninstalls are probably key metrics for them.
It’s everybody’s responsibility
It is everybody’s responsibility to understand the business impact of user problems.
- If you are a Designer, when you turn your user observation into a business problem you are adding value to your work. But in order to do this, Designers need to be familiar with and have access to key product metrics.
- If you are a Researcher, it is your job to match user insights to business problems. Otherwise, research just becomes anecdotal and will continue to feel a “nice to have” instead of a must.
- If you are a Product Manager, it is your job to understand the business impact of user problems because you are the ultimate responsible for product performance. User problems are your problems.
Make it a habit
Stating the business impact of user problems should become a habit for everybody in the team and become the standard way user insights are communicated.
So whether you are a Designer, a Product Manager or in any way involved with users and product download the template. Use it. Share it. Next time someone brings a user problem do the exercise of turning it into a business problem to understand the impact.
