Slides, How-to Videos, And How-to articles
I gave a talk at Product Camp Dublin in June 2024. Several attendees engaged with me about the presentation. I loved having these follow-up discussions with experts from different fields. I promised more details in a write-up, so here it is.
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Related:
Slide Deck PDF
You can download a PDF of the slide deck here.
Presentation Recording
Writing Things Down: In-Depth Guidance
You can find an in-depth guide on the different frameworks we discussed here:
3-step framework from How to Measure Customer Experience by Merging Product Analytics, Surveys, and Interviews
Feature adoption statistics from The 2019 Feature Adoption Report | Pendo.io White Papers
More details on the case study: An Adventure in Solving Customer Problems and Tidying-up Metrics
Structure your communications using Minto Pyramid from Untools
Requesting Feedback On The Talk
You can leave feedback on the talk here. The form will be up only till 20th June 2023.
FAQs From The Talk
Here are the audience questions and my thoughts. Photo by Bob Tait.
Q1 - How do you evaluate the opportunity cost of having your teams spend time solving this problem when they could be building something else?
I evaluated the opportunity cost and decided not to initiate large, independent initiatives. Instead, I chose to solve problems that:
Require minimal engineering effort and can be addressed with more technical writers, process changes, or marketing efforts.
Can be resolved by expanding the scope of existing projects rather than starting new ones
Q2 - A popular product might have a lot of tickets. How do you know whether 1000 tickets a month is good or bad?
One thousand tickets a month isn't meaningful without context. So, instead of absolute number of tickets, I analyzed normalized tickets per active customer. I also combined this with NPS responses to determine that this is a significant pain point for customers and GTM teams.
Q3 - Can you prioritize looking at the segment of the customers you want to focus on or the revenue you're getting from them?
Yes, we should prioritize issues for specific customer segments. I did not have this data in my case study. I collaborated with Sales Operations, Support Operations, and other teams to link segment and revenue information to customer support requests. However, the data was not clean. So, we revised the ticket submission process to improve data quality for future prioritization.
Q4 - Can you look at the confidence of achieving success from a solution to prioritize?
Yes, this is the RICE framework. I did not apply it in this experience.
Q5 - Do you think you looked at the wrong KPIs? Or maybe if you had the right KPIs in place, you would have made different decisions and skipped this project?
My primary KPI was the number of support tickets per month, but it was a lagging indicator. I could have set a benchmark to halt the project if certain metrics didn’t improve after a set period to overcome sunk-cost fallacy. Instead, I focused on leading indicators and worked on non-engineering solutions to help customers discover features.
Q6 - You said building features doesn't solve customer problems, but you discussed building features. Why so?
In my case study, I highlighted two features my team built. However, these did not improve the metrics. Instead, I executed dozens of process and marketing tasks to improve customer discovery of features and information.
Debrief Of Presenting At Product Camp Dublin
In another post, I will debrief my experience of preparing, performance, and the process post-talk. See here: Product Camp Dublin 2024 Preparation, Performance, and Post-Action.