Written by Will Soprano, All Things Web & Product
From writer to all things dev & tech, Will has spent a lifetime trying, failing, learning, and growing. In nurturing his ability as a writer, he found that he had a knack for supporting software developers & connecting orgs across functions.
Startups are constantly advised to “do user research” but no one talks about its impact on marketing outcomes or how to maximize the value of said research. Often overlooked is how user research can extend far beyond product development - influencing demand generation, sales, marketing, customer support, and even business strategy.
When we do user research well we better understand our audience and customers, which improves the entire organization. Most specifically it can (and will) impact demand generation for your product because you’ll solve real problems your users have, explicitly understand your purchase drivers and friction points.
This all leads us to a more effective machine by progressive revelation (progressively revealing the buyer product / service) and creating things that actually convert. Ready? Let’s get into it…
User research touches everything
So every startup out there is told to do user research. But most don’t dig into the reasons why research is so important. And almost no one saves their work to use in demand generation.
At a high-level, the answer is: user research affects every part of the business. In fact, when spelling out the answer to why UX, they’ve found an increased ROI. But on a deeper level, here’s what those effects actually look like in practice:
Product: Build more effective features
Identify what problems your users really face so you can build to meet those issues
Reduce time wasted on building features that fall flat usage-wise after launch
Figure out why usage is so low for a feature your users told you they absolutely needed
Diagnose and smash product bugs faster
Sales: Increase the chance of winning deals
Uncover objections and pre-empt them in future sales calls
Understand your customers’ biggest purchase-drivers (this goes double when working with multi-stakeholder purchasing teams as you’ll understand which drivers are most important to the purchaser, the champion, and the end-user)
Pinpoint and reduce friction points in your sales process
Marketing: Create better-converting campaigns
Spot up-and-coming competitors in your space
Write better-converting copy across all your marketing channels and surfaces
Map out what your buyers’ journey really looks like to create more effective campaigns
Customer support: Reduce ticket times with better resources
Understand the parts of your product that most commonly confuse users
Know what commonly asked questions should be built out into an FAQ
Write responses templates that help users solve their issues quickly
Business: Develop strategy, budget, and collaborate more effectively
Determine whether your current pricing is too high, too low, or just right
Allocate budget more effectively across all departments
Align on strategy with much less back-and forth.
In short, user research will help every single person in your company do their job better. So if user research is so great, why don’t more startups do it? In my experience it comes down to three reasons:
They’re intimidated by it
They don’t know how to do it
They can’t get buy-in from the founder or senior leadership
Here’s how you can tackle each one:
Research isn’t as difficult as you think
Now, I know UX researchers are going to run screaming at this statement. There is an art to great user research.
But imagine I set you down in the middle of Star-t'up forest. You know your destination, Fund's Landing, is somewhere to the northeast of your location.
Would you rather:
Try to navigate the forest at random?
Try to navigate after the following quick lesson:
Produc-marquit-fit moss typically grows on the north side of the tree. Sometimes, it can grow on the south or west side of a tree as well.
User research is the same way. Yes, there are plenty of ways for it to lead you astray if you're not careful.
But limited information, even if it risks drawing off-base conclusions, is better than absolutely none. With a bit of experience and plenty of gut-checks, you’ll quickly learn how to identify the misleading info.
With the intimidation factor out of the way, let’s dive into how to run your user research.
The startup’s crash course to user research
There’s a huge variety of user research methods out there. For startups, understanding how to run surveys and user interviews will cover almost all of your research needs in both SEO and product management. To keep things concise, I’m going to focus on user interviews.
There’s 7 principles to getting started with lean interviews:
Understand the differences in product and marketing research
What question are you trying to answer?
Match your participant pool to your purpose
Avoid leading questions
Leave your ego at the door
Avoid leading tangents
Summarize and share everywhere
Product vs. marketing research
First up, all research is NOT the same. Most startups try to cram both product research and marketing research into the same interview. This is a recipe for chaos and limited insights:
For product research, you’re trying to understand why and how people use your product. Early on, you might be running hypothesis testing to confirm or deny certain theories. Further into your product’s lifecycle, you might run discovery interviews to decide new features to build. Because you’re working on building a better product, this type of research tends to help most with activation and retention within your product.
For marketing research, however, you want to understand what made someone buy your product. This type of research will cover topics around the buyer’s journey, such as what made them start looking for a solution like yours, whether they considered competitors, and what made them select your product over those competitors. As a result, you’re digging into insights that will aid acquisition, paid conversions, and monetization.
Now, you will likely find useful information about your ideal customer persona in both types of interviews. Users will likely touch on pain points of some form or discuss what they love about your product.
But which type of interview you run should be informed by your focus area. Speaking of which, that leads us to the next principle:
Understand what you need to learn
One of the biggest mistakes any startup can make when running research is to simply say: “Oh, we’re just running interviews! We don’t need a plan.”
This is how you end up with a rambling, circuitous interview that confuses your interviewee and yields almost zero useful insights.
Instead, you need to know why you’re doing the research. What question are you actually trying to answer? If you know this, you’ll be able to come up with a much more targeted question list and mine for real, useful insights.
Here are some examples of focused topics:
We need to understand why our activation rates are so low for a certain app surface
Our industry-mix is changing and we need to learn more about why users in [insert your new industry here] buy our product
Users who joined in February of last year are churning at a higher rate than other cohorts. Why?
This method of planning has worked with the scientific method for ages. So before you even consider recruiting research participants, state and refine your research question carefully.
And on the topic of recruitment…
Match your participant pool to your purpose
Not all research participant feedback is created equal. Feedback from certain audiences will be more useful than others. But finding that audience fit comes down to the question you’re trying to answer.
If you’re trying to understand whether a new feature will be helpful to your user base, you need to chat with current users. If you need to know why your activation rates are abysmal, you may need to walk through onboarding with a non-user who’s never used your product to find friction points. And if you want to understand why someone chose to go with a competitor rather than you, you need to run win-loss research.
Thus, once you’ve nailed down your research question, consider who the best person will be to answer that question. Then recruit from that group–it’ll remove a few variables from an already complicated equation.
By the way, if you’re wondering how many participants you need to recruit: there’s a study indicating the optimal sample size is anywhere between 9-17 interviews (i.e. after this number of interviews, you tend to hear the same information over again and aren’t netting new insights). A good few of my colleagues who run user research programs recommend 7-12 interviews.
For early-stage startups, I advise taking even that down a notch. Why? Because you may not have a large participant pool to recruit from, most early stage startups are crunched for time, and you likely don’t have a dedicated user research team. Plus, minimizing your overwhelm can be half the battle.
So 5-7 interviews should get you the majority of information you need, especially if the insights all point to the same conclusion. You may miss out on a few insight nuggets, but we’re running lean user research here, not exhaustive research. You can always build a more in-depth program as your startup grows.
Leave your ego at the door
Founders, this is an especially important point for you. User interviews often uncover flaws in your product or unmet customer needs. You cannot take this as a personal insult.
Getting honest feedback is already hard enough, primarily because most people don’t enjoy insulting strangers. If an interviewee feels you’re getting defensive, they’ll adjust and soften their feedback to placate you - and this reduces the impact of the research.
However well-meaning, this appeasement does not win product-market fit.
So if you’re emotionally invested in the product or research area, prepare to leave your ego at the door. In fact, I’d suggest encouraging your interviewees to be unflinchingly honest at the beginning of your discussion. I usually tell my interviewees: ”Be as honest as possible. You will not hurt anyone’s feelings on the team. We need this feedback to improve, and if we get anything less than brutal honesty, we may not be able to do that.”
If the thought of saying that makes you balk, then let someone else on your team run the interview. Preferably, you want someone who’s informed about the project but not as emotionally involved.
Once you’re in the room, you have a couple of practical considerations.
Avoid leading questions
Here’s where we truly get into the art portion of user research. Even seasoned researchers can slip into asking leading questions at times.
The first point you have to accept here is: you cannot completely eliminate your bias from the equation. If you’re drafting the interview questions, they will in some way be influenced by your personal biases. And those biases often lead to asking leading questions.
The second piece is learning how to avoid obvious leading questions. Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts here. But if you want to shorten your learning curve, I highly suggest reading Rob Fitzpatrick’s The Mom Test. It’s a fairly short, accessible read that’s absolutely packed with research wisdom.
Finally, if you happen to lead an interviewee a bit during an interview, don’t despair. Simply recognize that the leading questions occurred and therefore those insights may need to be taken with a grain of salt.
Don’t be afraid to follow tangents
In any interview, you will invariably listen to a participant veer slightly off the intended track of a question.
Most startup teams ignore these asides, choosing instead to focus strictly on their list of prepared questions.
But sometimes, these tangents can lead to insight gold. Don’t be afraid to follow them. I will be among the first to admit it’s intimidating to have to go off-script. However, if you’re coming from a place of curiosity, you’ll usually find a fairly natural thread to follow.
Simply make sure the tangent discussion doesn’t take up your entire interview. Ask every participant if they have a hard stop before starting the interview. If they do, commit to only exploring tangents for a minute or two before circling back to your primary questions.
If your participants are willing to extend the interview out a bit further than planned, you can dive deeper. But make sure to signal to the interviewee that you’re exploring an aside and it may make the interview run longer as a result.
Summarize, summarize, and share
Your user research is only as valuable as your ability to share it. I have seen far too many situations where a team went to a ton of trouble to run interviews and then proceeded to watch those insights rot.
You have two culprits at play here:
Lack of summarization
Lack of sharing
When I took Reforge’s User Insights for Product Decisions (now User Insights for Product Development, I believe), one piece of advice changed my post-production process with interviews. That advice? Summarize every session immediately after you conduct it.
This way, interesting tidbits of information and particularly helpful insights are top-of-mind. You’re also less likely to forget mundane-seeming but potentially useful information as well.
I summarize my research at two levels: the interview level and the overall project level. Once I’ve summarized all my individual interviews, I compare and contrast the insights at the project level and analyze possible patterns. This can help you identify where valid points likely sit (i.e. if 3-4 interviewees all tell you the same thing, it’s likely true) versus “one-offs.” From there, I then extract all of my insights into a final, top-level document (usually a presentation, executive summary, or one-pager) to share across the company.
Optimally, every user research project should be covered in such a way that a brand new team member can read the documentation and learn from it without asking the research team members any questions. Think of it this way:
Your top level summary gives busy team leads and managers the fast “what we did, what we learned, why it matters, and what we’re doing as a result” summary
Your project-level summary will help inform the research team and anyone executing in the weeds
And your individual interview summaries provide quotable voice-of-customer data for your marketing team and a body of proof for individual contributors to pull from when making cases to their managers or leadership teams
More sharing = more insights across multiple teams and more usefulness for your entire company.
A last word to unconvinced founders and leadership
Hopefully, I’ve made a strong enough case for lean user research that helps grow your business without expending a ton of time or resources. And breaking down the process should also help ease the getting started nerves.
But if you’re still skeptical, I’ll leave you with one last bit of advice: running user research makes your users and customers feel like you care about them. It builds an unquantifiable, intangible goodwill, even for users who don’t participate in the research.
On the other hand, declaring user research is too involved or a waste of time makes it look like you don’t care about your customers. Your prospective customers may not realize it. Your current customers may only have an uncomfortable inkling of it.
But your team will know. Most folks, especially those who work at startups, take pride in serving customers and users well. When you actively discourage user research, you’re making it far harder for your team to hit that goal.
Eventually, that apathetic attitude will infect your company culture, drive off top-performers who actually care about your company, and attract listless, self-centered employees who are perfectly happy to let customers have terrible experiences.
At best, your customers will complain. Most likely, they’ll churn. At worst, they’ll churn, then go on to bad-mouth your company to everyone they know...
Massive, multi-national corporations might be able to absorb huge numbers of dissatisfied customers. But for startups? Your reputation is your lifeline to growth.
So user research is not only a question of optimizing your business, it’s a question of preserving a positive company culture and future growth as well.
Editor’s note:
This article was co-written by Micah McGuire and Will Soprano. Micah is a Product Marketing expert that is currently building her own product (EmberWrite). She’s a mentor on GrowthMentor and is obsessed with user research. I’m grateful that she granted her time and expertise to write this with me!
Learn more about Will Soprano on LinkedIn and his personal blog.
Will Soprano, All Things Web & Product
From writer to all things dev & tech, Will has spent a lifetime trying, failing, learning, and growing. In nurturing his ability as a writer, he found that he had a knack for supporting software developers & connecting orgs across functions. As his career arc was hitting its first pea,k he found himself broken physically, emotionally, and professionally. That was the beginning of his personal growth. After years of trial and error,r he finally realized that sobriety was the answer. With nearly 4 years sober, he's not just a new person socially but professionally as well. The mental health community and his peers professionally have responded to his willingness to serve and authenticity.
