It’s impossible for teams to provide real value to the customer without understanding exactly how a product is hard to use. The phrase “Make it easier” is an all-too-common answer to the question of how the team’s work should be providing value for the customer, but it is not a product strategy in and of itself.
Make it Easier: Not Just a Phrase, a Starting Point
A product strategy should begin with “make it easier,” but it cannot end there.
To develop a truly effective strategy, every team member needs to understand the reasoning behind decisions made by others in the past, and how that decision fits into the overall product strategy.
Validation vs Research
Validation is not research; it looks for divergent interpretations of evidence that support our preferred interpretation.
Asking customers if something would make it easier leads to misleading conclusions and does not provide helpful data for making decisions.
Prioritizing & Cost Considerations
To gain useful feedback and prioritize between competing areas, companies should root features in concrete needs and ask open-ended questions that get at why customers are making certain choices.
This helps them understand customer needs better and allows for an honest conversation about cost.
A Hypothesis-Driven Design Approach
A hypothesis-driven design approach can help create an effective strategy through a sequence of 4 sections: the friction users experience while achieving their goal; the missing customer benefit to overcome those frictions; the proposed solution that delivers that benefit; and the specific actions that enable users to receive concrete benefits from those actions.
Make It Easier: A Starting Point
When companies treat “make it easier” as a starting point, they can use research to fill out the rest of the product hypothesis, starting with the user goal.
This helps provide context to what makes something hard to discover and prioritize between different solution ideas.
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