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Product Discovery and Customer Research with Michele Hansen
## Links
Jobs to be done
Milkshake in the morning theory
Practical Empathy - Indi Young
Sales Safari
Michele Hansen's talk at MicroConf 2019: How to get Useful User Feedback
30x500 - Amy Hoy
## Transcript (powered by Otter.ai - Please raise any issues found in the transcript. AI will one day get us there, but until then...)
George Stocker 0:00
Hello, I'm George Stocker, and this is the build better software podcast. Today we're talking about product discovery and customer product research. I have the privilege of welcoming Michelle Hanson, founder and CEO of Geocod.io to the show to talk about this. Welcome, Michelle. Hi.
Michele Hansen 0:15
Thank you for having me on today.
George Stocker 0:17
Thanks for joining us. Now for people who may or may not know you, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your work?
Michele Hansen 0:24
Yeah, so I'm co founder of geocod.io, which is a bootstrap software as a service company that my husband and I started about six and a half years ago. We started it as a side project and over a couple of years of slowly growing, listening to our customers and building for what they needed, and where the gaps in the market were. Transition to full time. So my background is in product development. And that's primarily what what I would say my background is, is in and where my heart really lies. So now running a company was just the two of us take on a lot of hats far beyond product.
George Stocker 1:05
Yeah. And before GeoCod.io Do you also did product research or product management type work for the Motley Fool?
Michele Hansen 1:16
Yeah, so I did product management and product development, which was an incredibly fun part of my career, worked with some really wonderful people and did a lot of fun research that led to some some good outcomes.
George Stocker 1:30
Okay, so what was so I think that the Motley Fool is a is a services company. They have financial newsletters that they that they sell subscription services to. And Geocod.io is a SaaS product?
Michele Hansen 1:48
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So so one was b2c, and the other is b2b, which has shown me some really interesting differences and what it's like to do customer research and in a consumer context versus in a business context, I think there are a lot more similarities than people might think.
George Stocker 2:06
Okay, so let's let's dive first into the into the b2c context the consumer. And so that would that would be your work at The Motley Fool I, I believe, right?
Michele Hansen 2:16
Yeah So So you mentioned that they create financial newsletters and a lot of what we're doing is basically how do we modernize the concept of a financial newsletter so they had gone from being print newsletters and then and then been fairly revolutionary and bringing them online fairly early. And then how do you evolve that into something that meets the expectations that consumers have now of things being customized and personalized and meeting their interests and being consumable very quickly, all those those kinds of things about that are that are very, that have been very relevant in consumer for quite some time now. How do we make the concept of a financial newsletter or a fight or a sort of financial publishing product meet those kinds of experts. Yeah. And so what was the where would an idea start? And where would the customer come in? When you were designing something new for a customer at the fool? That's a really interesting question because it came in and a lot of different places. When we first started really working directly with customers, when I was there, it was at the very end of the process, which people say is generally not when you should start talking to them, you should start talking to them before you even have the idea. But when we first started, the customer was was not in the beginning part of the process. And so it was more at the very end in terms of usability testing. And the more and more we did that, and the more and and more that we were creating things and then they weren't reaching the KPIs that we were hoping for that we started going back in the process and talking to the customer earlier and earlier and earlier, until eventually the customer was the very first start. We did a lot of different types of customer interaction from in depth interviews that could be an hour or an hour and a half to usability testing to. We did testing of products, we did testing of landing pages. We did observations through tools like hot jar and user testing, where you're not actually interacting with the user. We were fortunate to do a lot of different types of learning from our customer.
George Stocker 4:26
Yeah. And so you noticed that there was a KPI difference. So when you talk to the customers earlier, did it did it affect your KPIs? Did they go in, they start going in the right directions. Was there a correlation between the two?
Michele Hansen 4:39
Yeah, so where the product process would start, what for probably about the first year I was there was you you would have you know, a spreadsheet of all of the different KPIs and measures of you know, different groups of users and whether they are meeting them and you know, so if a user clicked on this, their livelihood, that they they ended up meeting the KPI was was this but if they didn't click on this, but they clicked on this and said, You know that they and sort of all sorts of permutations like that. And so it really start out with Okay, what's the what is the spreadsheet say about the users who are the most successful did these actions so then how do we make more users do those actions so they become more successful? And the problem was that was that those those actions really weren't weren't causative. And there was an awareness that those actions weren't causative. But there was a limited ability to be able, well, if we don't, if we don't use the spreadsheet, then what are we going to use? And so there could be a little, you know, well, let's bring in customer support and see what they think. And so we would you be gradually refining the products. And it really wasn't until we started interviewing the customers and diving deep into what they were trying to do. And baking usability testing into the process and bringing developers and designers into those interviews and into those usability sessions, that we really started to have breakthroughs. And so it sounds like the fool had a very robust technical process. For getting metrics from users like they, and it sounds like from what I'm hearing, at least that you took that you also but you think started may or once you focused on actually face to face conversations with with your customer. Yeah, there was an extremely strong culture of quantitative data. And where we ended up evolving the process was bringing in the, the qualitative side to explain why the quantitative data was showing us what it was because you can, you can, you know, look at Google Analytics all day, but it's never going to tell you why somebody did something. Only a person can tell you that, of course, you shouldn't just talk to one person, you need to talk to lots of them. But But we found that that really helped explain to us why ...
View all episodes
By George Stocker## Links
Jobs to be done
Milkshake in the morning theory
Practical Empathy - Indi Young
Sales Safari
Michele Hansen's talk at MicroConf 2019: How to get Useful User Feedback
30x500 - Amy Hoy
## Transcript (powered by Otter.ai - Please raise any issues found in the transcript. AI will one day get us there, but until then...)
George Stocker 0:00
Hello, I'm George Stocker, and this is the build better software podcast. Today we're talking about product discovery and customer product research. I have the privilege of welcoming Michelle Hanson, founder and CEO of Geocod.io to the show to talk about this. Welcome, Michelle. Hi.
Michele Hansen 0:15
Thank you for having me on today.
George Stocker 0:17
Thanks for joining us. Now for people who may or may not know you, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your work?
Michele Hansen 0:24
Yeah, so I'm co founder of geocod.io, which is a bootstrap software as a service company that my husband and I started about six and a half years ago. We started it as a side project and over a couple of years of slowly growing, listening to our customers and building for what they needed, and where the gaps in the market were. Transition to full time. So my background is in product development. And that's primarily what what I would say my background is, is in and where my heart really lies. So now running a company was just the two of us take on a lot of hats far beyond product.
George Stocker 1:05
Yeah. And before GeoCod.io Do you also did product research or product management type work for the Motley Fool?
Michele Hansen 1:16
Yeah, so I did product management and product development, which was an incredibly fun part of my career, worked with some really wonderful people and did a lot of fun research that led to some some good outcomes.
George Stocker 1:30
Okay, so what was so I think that the Motley Fool is a is a services company. They have financial newsletters that they that they sell subscription services to. And Geocod.io is a SaaS product?
Michele Hansen 1:48
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So so one was b2c, and the other is b2b, which has shown me some really interesting differences and what it's like to do customer research and in a consumer context versus in a business context, I think there are a lot more similarities than people might think.
George Stocker 2:06
Okay, so let's let's dive first into the into the b2c context the consumer. And so that would that would be your work at The Motley Fool I, I believe, right?
Michele Hansen 2:16
Yeah So So you mentioned that they create financial newsletters and a lot of what we're doing is basically how do we modernize the concept of a financial newsletter so they had gone from being print newsletters and then and then been fairly revolutionary and bringing them online fairly early. And then how do you evolve that into something that meets the expectations that consumers have now of things being customized and personalized and meeting their interests and being consumable very quickly, all those those kinds of things about that are that are very, that have been very relevant in consumer for quite some time now. How do we make the concept of a financial newsletter or a fight or a sort of financial publishing product meet those kinds of experts. Yeah. And so what was the where would an idea start? And where would the customer come in? When you were designing something new for a customer at the fool? That's a really interesting question because it came in and a lot of different places. When we first started really working directly with customers, when I was there, it was at the very end of the process, which people say is generally not when you should start talking to them, you should start talking to them before you even have the idea. But when we first started, the customer was was not in the beginning part of the process. And so it was more at the very end in terms of usability testing. And the more and more we did that, and the more and and more that we were creating things and then they weren't reaching the KPIs that we were hoping for that we started going back in the process and talking to the customer earlier and earlier and earlier, until eventually the customer was the very first start. We did a lot of different types of customer interaction from in depth interviews that could be an hour or an hour and a half to usability testing to. We did testing of products, we did testing of landing pages. We did observations through tools like hot jar and user testing, where you're not actually interacting with the user. We were fortunate to do a lot of different types of learning from our customer.
George Stocker 4:26
Yeah. And so you noticed that there was a KPI difference. So when you talk to the customers earlier, did it did it affect your KPIs? Did they go in, they start going in the right directions. Was there a correlation between the two?
Michele Hansen 4:39
Yeah, so where the product process would start, what for probably about the first year I was there was you you would have you know, a spreadsheet of all of the different KPIs and measures of you know, different groups of users and whether they are meeting them and you know, so if a user clicked on this, their livelihood, that they they ended up meeting the KPI was was this but if they didn't click on this, but they clicked on this and said, You know that they and sort of all sorts of permutations like that. And so it really start out with Okay, what's the what is the spreadsheet say about the users who are the most successful did these actions so then how do we make more users do those actions so they become more successful? And the problem was that was that those those actions really weren't weren't causative. And there was an awareness that those actions weren't causative. But there was a limited ability to be able, well, if we don't, if we don't use the spreadsheet, then what are we going to use? And so there could be a little, you know, well, let's bring in customer support and see what they think. And so we would you be gradually refining the products. And it really wasn't until we started interviewing the customers and diving deep into what they were trying to do. And baking usability testing into the process and bringing developers and designers into those interviews and into those usability sessions, that we really started to have breakthroughs. And so it sounds like the fool had a very robust technical process. For getting metrics from users like they, and it sounds like from what I'm hearing, at least that you took that you also but you think started may or once you focused on actually face to face conversations with with your customer. Yeah, there was an extremely strong culture of quantitative data. And where we ended up evolving the process was bringing in the, the qualitative side to explain why the quantitative data was showing us what it was because you can, you can, you know, look at Google Analytics all day, but it's never going to tell you why somebody did something. Only a person can tell you that, of course, you shouldn't just talk to one person, you need to talk to lots of them. But But we found that that really helped explain to us why ...