Life of a Business Principal in Consulting

A part of my responsibility as a Business Principal also involves facilitating conversations on end user feedback and how it maps to business goals. There are several tools to map end user feedback to business goals. However, the intent is to understand how users perceive a business goal.  We designed a more engaging exercise that can lead to more detailed inquiry on how the business goal impacts the end users. This post is a quick experience report on facilitating an exercise Appreciative Inquiry that helped us in this intent.

User Personas are a very good tool for the product owners, business analysts or product managers to be able to co-create with designers. It is predominantly a product of the user research and should not be an amalgamation of demographic data. It is the best way for us to list all scenarios that a persona would take when they want to attain a goal. It is predominantly used to build empathy with user, focus the team and build consensus in a large diverse stakeholder group. The website I referred to is here:  https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/08/a-closer-look-at-personas-part-1/

How do you do your job as a product manager every day if you do not know what problems you have set your product to solve? One of the most important tasks of a product manager it to catalog problems that prospects / target user base faces. Just follow the steps and you can get really good at it. Step 1: Listen to potential users When you go out to meet people - either potential users or potential customers - you need to listen to what they speak. If you are really good, write it down as soon as possible as you keep listening. That is just step 1. Step 2: Look at what they do As they keep talking, chip in once in a while and ask them what they do and why they do what they do. While this might seem an innocuous question, it is the most powerful question and has enormous power. Reason: You are going to get actions from the customer. Step 3: Listen carefully to the one key thing that they say they are actually looking for. When customers actually demonstrate to yo...

The biggest task of the product manager is to find your target audience. Typically it is a very tight rope walk. You define it too narrowly and you would struggle to generalize the product later. You define it too broad and you would struggle to satisfy a lot of people and the product might not take off at all. There is this awesome post by Dave Mcclure on why Niche target segment works. Blog link here . What he says is mostly right and that is what we did as well. We did it mostly by accident. We had to define our niche because we could only talk to those kind of retailers and get data from them to start developing the data. It did have its upside. We were very clear on what we wanted to develop and we are slowly talking to retailers and adding more scenarios. As we are doing this, we are also talking to a slightly different set of retailers. This helps us incrementally build our product while also generalizing the existing features. In our case, we did not fin...