May’s BPMA theme was “Who is your user?”. As product managers or marketers, our users may vary – sometimes they are your direct (economic) customer; for others, they may be your indirect customer. You may be selling them a software service, or a hardware widget. Regardless, it is critical to understand who is ultimately using your product and what matters to them in the process of using it. This means that an important area of your expertise is knowing how to identify, capture and share this customer knowledge.
To help with this, we’ve assembled a list of “greatest hits” from the BPMA ProductHub blog archives below, sorted by topic, for further reading. Enjoy!
User Research
Whether you come from your product’s industry or not, user research is a critical skill for anyone involved in product definition, marketing or development. Good user research is your primary weapon against cognitive bias and falling prey to your (and your team’s) assumptions.
- User Research: An Essential Foundation of a Product Strategy
- Cracking the Code on Customer Interviews
- The Why and How of conducting Customer Interviews
- The 7 product dimensions: A guide to asking the right questions
Persona Development
Once you begin to capture information about your users through research, one of the key ways to capture it is a persona. This is a fictional representation of the type of person that uses your product, and is intended to represent their wants, needs and behaviors.
Handling Customer Requests
In some cases, your challenge may be getting your hands on user data – any data. But in other cases, you may receive unsolicited requests for new products, features, or assets. Then, the challenge is identifying the signal from the noise. We have featured several articles about collecting, sorting, prioritizing and even ignoring customer requests:
- Decision-Driven Stakeholder Management
- The Case For NOT Listening To Your Customers’ Requests
- What Product Management and CSI Have In Common
Bonus!
Though not authored by the BPMA blog team, we have also included a timeless story about a failure in user research. This goes to show that even giant companies (and budgets) can fall prey to bias and error in user research. Be careful – and remember this tale every time you sip an ice-cold Coke this summer:
An ice cold Coca Cola Classic, please!
What are your best resources for knowing your user?
