How to Improve Product Features for User Needs

Revitalizing a Legacy Product: A Strategic Approach Taking on an older product with outdated code and limited documentation can be daunting. Where do you start when institutional knowledge is sparse? My approach is to go back to the source - connect directly with long-time employees and current users. Interview employees to reconstruct original motivations and use cases. Conduct usability testing and discovery interviews with customers to see how they leverage the product today. This field research uncovers valuable insights: ►Key workflows the product enables ►Functionality that customers actually use ►Opportunities to improve and solve new problems Don't just replicate the past. Leverage customer context to reimagine what's possible. New technologies may now enable you to build a far superior product. Watch users directly to identify core functionality versus unnecessary bloat. Collaborating closely with engineers is crucial too. Review the codebase for optimization opportunities. Determine if replatforming is needed to support modern architecture and experiences. In summary, let customer needs guide your vision. The problems users face today are likely different than when it was first built. Maintain a beginner's mindset. Then, architect creative solutions to exceed customer expectations. By coupling curiosity with technology, legacy products can transform into an organization's most impactful assets. There are hidden opportunities in the old - you just have to dig them out. What approaches have you found effective for modernizing legacy products? I'd love to hear your experiences! Listen now 🎧 Youtube: https://lnkd.in/eD3ABYH3 Website: https://lnkd.in/eU6RfMFe Do you have a burning product-related question for me? Feel free to submit one here DearMelissa.com and you might find your question featured and answered in an upcoming episode. #ProductThinking #DearMelissa #LegacyProducts #ProductModernization #CustomerCentric #TechInnovation

Good engineering is wasted if you build the wrong product. The other day, I meet a founder. He says “Oh, you’re a CTO?” He hands me his phone. “Can you look at my app? I'm not sure my engineering team did a good job.“ I say “it’s hard to be sure just by clicking around, but the layout seems fine, the performance is snappy. What’s wrong with it?” “Well, people aren’t using it enough” Ah, the plot thickens. As it happens, the engineering team is doing fine. But they’re contractors. They’re given Figma mocks and do a pixel-perfect implementation. But how do those mocks get created? They’re just following an arbitrary roadmap based on the founder’s intuition. Having strong intuition for what your users want is helpful, but it never happens in a vacuum. Your job as a founder is to talk to your users. A lot. When you all you have is a wireframe, show your users and look for validation that it meets a real need they’d be willing to pay for. When you have a higher-fidelity prototype, do it again. Summarize, and share these summaries with your engineers. Everyone who touches execution should be reading them. Once you’ve launched, mine insights from your monitoring tools. Do new features improve these metrics? If early testers aren’t engaging, ask why. Always assume you’re missing some key insight about user needs and be relentless in squeezing this insight from your users. Until you have product-market fit, the most valuable thing your users have for you isn’t their money, its their honest feedback. Getting this feedback isn’t easy, but it’s the shortest path to iterating on your product effectively. If you’re not doing this, you’re likely wasting precious time and engineering resources. 10 hours of talking to users saves you 100s (1000s?) of hours building the wrong thing.

We stalked out user while they shopped 🛒👀 Hypothesizing in a room only goes so far, but living the problem with the user gives us the truth. Charles and I embarked on a hunting trip to the nearest Publix Super Markets to observe our superuser in action with our app. The insights were invaluable, steering our feature prioritization: 1. Customers don’t want the hassle of going back and forth; sort items by shopping aisles. 🛒 2. Empower them to check off or add items spontaneously. ✅ 3. Bridge the gap with note-taking apps for seamless integration. 📝 If you’re building a product with user focus: 🚪 Step out and immerse yourself in the problem. 💬 Remember: the pitch might deceive, always listen to users. 🥴 Construct purposefully, always giving precedence to user needs. #UserExperience #ProblemSolving #PerspectiveShift

We are power users of Vistaly, and just because we ARE users of our product doesn't mean we are not speaking with customers every week. There's advice that being a customer of your product is an advantage. I see that every day and believe it, but this advice makes it incredibly tempting to want to prioritize the pain points you encounter using the product. You think: "I'm experiencing this problem or need. Others must be too". Embarrassing story time. - A theme kept popping up in interviews. - It wasn't a focus area at the time. - It took longer than I want to admit to hone in on the pattern (my biases got in the way). - Turns out – new users get overwhelmed by an enhancement that was added to make data entry quicker. NEW users... not me. We took these new insights, reflected on the power users' current needs, and ended up with a solution that improved the experience for both groups: Inline tree edits. Instead of constantly interacting with a side panel when adding cards (which can overwhelm new users seeing all these "extra" options for the first time), we can now make inline edits to any card and dive deeper when ready. It's faster to update cards inline when your goal is something like: - Updating KPIs, Key Results, and outcomes as you come across them in the tree. - Updating the statuses of opportunities, solutions, and experiments. - Adding yourself or others on the team as owners of any card type. It was not a pain I experienced, but I benefited from this improvement. Are you building Opportunity Solution Trees, KPI Trees, or looking for a way to visualize and collaborate on the discovery process? Follow us to hear more on the topic – Vistaly #product #productdiscovery

User-first thinking is essential for success in product management. Here are 5 key lessons I've learned in my career on how to enhance User-First Thinking : Understand users in context: Observe user interactions with your product in their natural environment to uncover deep-seated issues. For instance, Swiggy's PMs joined delivery executives on routes to understand challenges firsthand. Voice of Customer: Champion customer feedback analysis from various sources like social media, app store reviews, and support interactions. At Coinbase, PMs gathered insights from customer feedback monthly. Understand user insights and market: Delve into user insights about the market and use psychology to understand product relevance and usage frequency. For example, grocery delivery is a necessity, unlike food delivery which is an indulgence, where artificial demand can be generated. User Empathy: Develop user empathy by being a power user of your product, understanding different triggers and pain points. For example, a game developer plays their own game regularly to understand players' experiences. Quick Feedback: Maintain proximity to a group of power users for rapid feedback on potential ideas. For example, at Gojek while building the ads platform we rapidly gathered feedback on ad ideas through a merchant WhatsApp group.

You learn life's most impactful lessons from your mistakes and failures. Isn't it? However, when it happens, what goes in the mind? You are usually beating yourself up, "How did I do it?" "Why I couldn't be more mindful?" But did you know how we respond to them, reshapes our path? A few years ago, I was spearheading a project – a new project management software developed for a pro-bono consulting gig. We meticulously crafted each feature, aiming to create a budget-friendly yet powerful tool. The team was charged, and expectations were soaring. Then came the launch, and with it, a reality check. Our vision of a feature-packed tool had unintentionally led us astray from what the end-users actually needed - simplicity and intuitiveness. As the adoption rate dwindled and the discontent amongst the users grew, it dawned on us that we had been so engrossed in the technicality of the product that we overlooked the paramount importance of user experience. This realization was a significant turning point in my professional journey. Two valuable lessons were learned: 1️⃣ First, every aspect of product development must be guided by the user’s needs and experiences. 2️⃣ Second, even the most technologically advanced product will fail if it is not user-friendly. With these insights, we recalibrated our development process. We introduced a user-centric approach, involving potential users early in the design phase, and emphasized the role of user testing and feedback. The results? Products that not only met but frequently exceeded customer expectations, elevating our market share and customer satisfaction scores. This experience has made me a fervent advocate for customer involvement throughout the development process. It reiterated to me that we aren't just creating products; we are shaping experiences. Now, I encourage you to reflect on your professional journey. Is there a setback that taught you invaluable lessons? And more importantly, how have you applied those learnings to foster growth and improvement? Looking forward to hearing your stories in comments!