Background & Research


Software is changing the world we live in at an exponential rate. The people who are tasked with deciding what are the right things to build are the entrepreneurs, product managers and technology leaders of the world today.

For Product Managers/founders, it’s a constant challenge to make sure you are building the right things. Every time a new feature/product vision is defined, PMs have to articulate what problem they are solving and prioritise it against other problem statements before getting a team to work on a solution.

The challenge that PMs face is that customers do not always share their feedback due to their own constraints or it's that most unplanned feedback is received second hand (through numerous mediums and channels such as support, sales etc.). Feedback can also lack the details on the context of the situation for the user because of the medium it was sent through e.g. Intercom message.

Today the best options PMs have to attain more details on the problem are to follow up with calls, face to face meetings or shipping an MVP to get first hand feedback from customers if the product is going in the right direction of solving their problem. The anxiety and full details of when the problem occurred for the user is often lost due to the issues highlighted above.

If there was a way that PMs could attain more details on the context on their customers problems then it will reduce the time spent getting up to speed on this missing context through current mediums.

All of the job stories below have been gathered from 1-1 interviews with PMs, observations in a startup of 35+ people and various product forums/slack groups online.

Sample Extract of conversation on Product Schools slack channel

https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/a7b6f440-5ac2-4686-8cd9-faa981fc6131/Screenshot2019-01-17at20.22.00.png

Why?


Opportunity

  1. Technology is continuing to grow
  2. AI concerns can have a major impact on the world
  3. $76 billion is the expected growth of the SaaS public market by 2020 (Financesonline.com)

Costs

  1. Time
  2. Financial