How to understand your product and your market

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30 Sep 2020

Once you’re measuring your product-market fit though the end-user satisfaction question you will want to know "why?" Why do the people who love your product love it?

It sounds strange, but most product people don’t understand their products. They know the product features. They know who they think the market is. But they don’t know who loves their product. They don’t know what those people love about it. And this can often be something different than what the product set out to be.

You can ask your end-users another question if you want to understand your product through the eyes of your biggest fans. Ask them what their favorite parts of your product are. You need to phrase this in a way that doesn’t ask about features, or you’ll get a boring list of functional features that doesn’t tell you much. Your product is more than a list of features. Your product feedback needs to be more than a list of features, too. You want feedback to be a mix of functional and non-functional things.

Ask, "What do you like best about the product?"

Phrased this way, some users may mention their favorite feature. Some will talk about how it makes them feel. Some will talk about what problem it solves for them. They might mention your customer service. Your pricing. Or even how fast and responsive the product is.

Cluster the responses. There will be outliers. Someone probably just loves that one of your buttons is purple. But the biggest clusters of responses coming from your biggest fans are the reason that your target customer loves your product. The people that fall into those clusters represent the target customer for the product you have today. There’s a growth opportunity in finding customers that are looking for a product that fills those same needs.

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