5 insight gathering techniques to build a successful product

How to never run out of valuable product insights

Photo by Ameen Fahmy on Unsplash

Capturing insights is one of the essential processes for building products. New insights help:

• refine existing ideas
• understand the big picture better
• assess if you are working on the most impactful things

All you need is to invest a couple of hours each month into these five areas.

Market analysis

There’s a lot we can learn from analyzing other products on the market.

Although primary competitors are usually our main focus, we shouldn’t focus only on them.

Even completely unrelated products might be a great source of inspiration and unique solutions.

Try

• Having a regular slot in your calendar to analyze competitors and other products on the market and note down interesting insights.
• Periodical lighting demos with the whole team when everyone picks one interesting product and presents how it solves particular problems.

Data review

Although data can be a great source of insights, it’s also easy to spend hundreds of hours exploring data points without actually learning anything. Keep your data reviews as specific as possible.

Try

• Weekly pulse-check. Check your core metrics on a regular basis to monitor any anomalies. Investigate these anomalies to understand user behavior better.
• Hypothesizing and testing at least one data-driven conjecture every two weeks. Formulate a clear hypothesis, test it with data, and repeat. At some point you’ll stumble on interesting data-driven insights that might be worth investigating deeper.

User touchpoints

Nothing beats regularly talking to users. Period.

Yet, although we all seem to know that, this area is still one of the most often neglected. Probably because preparing, conducting, and summarizing interactions with users is time-consuming.