Crowd-generated Resources in Product Discovery
Crowd-generated Resources in Product Discovery
User-generated materials for basic product intelligence
This autumn, I finished a course organized by Product Alliance & Mixpanel (for those who don’t know - they are running a robust product analytics tool which is also quite pricey).
As I went through the course, I thought about the unlimited research potential of all these third-party materials for Mixpanel itself.
So basically, for well-established markets with a bit of active competition, you don’t have to rely solely on interviews everyone’s talking about. These are ideal but, at times, very difficult to organize, finance and run regularly.
The field of crowd-generated content with your product is not only a source of sales but research assets depicting the real-world usage of your tool “out in the wild”, with all your bugs and downsides. Free of charge. A well-established & ripe product with history is needed here, though.
Otherwise, you won’t find much.
I.e. it is more for a platform PM, but not always.
Think Jira or Telegram.
Mixpanel and Google Analytics.
For example, you will find tonnes of materials on Mixpanel - be it how-to’s, tutorials, unofficial webinars and guides, all of it user-generated with a surprising look at the problem. All these users provide their angle on Mixpanel’s solutions, alternatives and their JTBD. Some of this stuff is impossible to find out if you are on a budget and don’t have an unlimited line of credit to pay for your client’s time. They might be busy for you too.
One tiny remark here: I’d like to warn you that a big chunk of courses, brochures or books is often nothing more than a pitch deck one publishes to gain new clients. At times, the proposed solutions are questionable at best. But if you run B2B2C - knowing how folks tend to sell your product is worth a lot.
It would be fair to note that interviewees often have a hidden agenda to get their 50 USD for an interview and make it all useful & actionable for you; they will start presenting problems no one has. I have been there. On the other hand, forum posts, videos, and long-reads are beneficial, be they linked to your product line or your competition’s.
It doesn’t work for fresh things, though, but there still might be a course or two on solving that one problem you intend to fix with your product.
If you type “Mixpanel” in Youtube’s search box, you will be presented with a myriad of first-person reviews ready for grabs. In our example, it is a SaaS B2B tool, so there will be tutorials and generic ‘strategic’ videos explaining the data collection in more depth.
What’s important here is the algorithms those heavy users apply when using your tool. The human algorithms meant as operations & their corresponding order.
This content can often answer questions about errors, unconventional solutions, tricks to save some credits or ways to sell one’s consultancy services (they call those “angles” in performance marketing).
Monitoring those constantly (ask your social media people whether they use something like brand24) is of immense value especially looking at your products through the lens of the Kano model.
We are not starting with blank slates, and at times you will find yourself chasing your competition to reach that industry-accepted benchmark before you decide how to move on with the USP & differentiation any further. Some things have to be there for your survival. It is the bare minimum expected by the customer.
Here is a short video on the Kano model:
The stuff above supports my understanding of the state my product is in.
What’s the ‘standard’ these days?
I hear someone swearing about customer development and jobs to be done.
It is all great, but you often have to consider the distribution & people buying the product (not the actual users one talks to).
If we talk about B2B clients, they often tend to order things with the most functions listed in the offer (and they won’t be using them too).
A longer list of features wins the battle; I have seen it many times.
And if you tweak your brain to grasp this skewed logic, you will find yourself building features to keep up with the market, to fill out those ticks on the proposal. Even features no one uses.
There are long threads on politics, feature factories and ticket monkeys, but even decent PMs frequently find themselves building stuff no one needs for various reasons. One of those has been presented above.
It is the essence of so-called “moving targets”, where you jump along with competitors as the “bare minimum” of your products rises.
That is why I’d recommend the following:
Find & do some online courses involving your products (or your competitors’)
Find & track everything product-related being used by ordinary folks out there (forums, videos, courses and books); Conferences and meetups will do too.
Pay attention to online mentions on services like brand24 (track as many relevant terms as possible).
Find other sources trying to solve problems with similar tools or manually (say, there is no automation, but there is an article explaining how to achieve the result by spending an hour or two).
Be out there and track your competition’s deeds. At the same time, no one says to copy them in everything these folks do, having a min. bar - an acceptable set of functionalities - is a must.
Be on top of everything published & connected to your product. Sometimes, things expressed in public differ from the intel you get during the interviews for various reasons. Your prospects like you, you failed to ask the right questions, or it is a specific period when every prospect of yours is bothered with stuff not directly involving you. The findings will be affected, and you won’t know that something’s off.
Pay attention to the crowd-generated materials out there.