As a product manager, you're the champion of your product, navigating the intersection of business goals, development roadmaps, and the quest to delight users. But how can you be sure you're building the right thing, the right way? If you make a product in a vacuum without knowing how real users will interact with it, you take on unnecessary risk.
Empower yourself with UX research, your secret weapon for creating products that resonate.
UX research can be a secret weapon for product managers, providing data-driven insights to guide development and ensure the product resonates with its target audience.
Here's why PMs should champion UX research to maximize their products' success, meet KPIs faster, and navigate uncertainty in the competitive landscape.
- Keep your focus on the user, not your assumptions
It's easy to fall into the trap of building what you think users need. Many product teams have assumptions or hypotheses of what would be helpful for their users, but remember that your opinions can’t possibly understand or represent every user group. UX research ensures the user is always at the forefront of your product decisions. And by prioritizing intentional, inclusive recruiting, you’ll glean insights from a diverse pool of users, uncovering previously unknown needs, avoiding missteps, and identifying hidden use cases.
- Build products users actually want
Imagine pouring all your resources into a feature, only to see user engagement plummet. UX research helps you avoid this pitfall. By understanding user needs, behaviors, and pain points through early exploratory research, usability testing, and quantitative surveys, you gain invaluable insights that translate into features and functionality that address real problems for real people. This data becomes the foundation for informed decisions, leading to higher user satisfaction and adoption.
- Minimize costly mistakes
Backtracking to rework or redesign a feature that could have been better is a costly endeavor. Early and often, UX research reveals usability issues, preventing expensive and time-intensive redesigns.
- Prioritize effectively
With limited budget and resources, PMs must prioritize features that deliver the most value quickly. Research helps identify the most desired and impactful features, allowing for a more strategic roadmap and keeping development efforts focused on features with the highest ROI.
- Make data-driven decisions
PMs are data-driven by nature, and while you may have stats and data like conversion rates, time spent on the platform, daily active users, customer acquisition cost, and click-through rates, user research can provide a deeper layer of insights that shed light on those numbers. That user feedback can be used to convince stakeholders, build a more comprehensive and informed roadmap, secure budget, and demonstrate the potential impact of a product.
- Innovate with confidence
Great products not only solve existing problems, but also problems users didn't even know they had. UX research helps you uncover these hidden needs and opportunities for innovation. By understanding user behavior patterns and frustrations, you can identify data-informed areas where your product can take a step forward. Innovation for the sake of innovation won’t convince your customers, but innovation that solves a real need will.
- Increase user engagement and retention
A product that’s delightful to use keeps users coming back for more. UX research helps create intuitive interfaces and user flows that keep users engaged and satisfied, resulting in higher retention rates and a stronger product vision.
Are you a PM who isn’t sure where to start?
Based on years of experience working with product teams, we’ve developed several resources to help PMs build UX research into their product development lifecycle. Here are a few we recommend starting with:
By embracing and building partnerships with their UX research peers, product managers leverage a new and invaluable resource in their toolkit, gaining a user-centered and empathy-informed perspective, and ultimately building products users love.
