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Talking to users and building what they need. User research methods and insights from Lenny's Podcast guests.
“A question's good if it's specific, if it solicits rationale, and it's not biased. You don't want to start a question with, here's what I think because people have this tendency to want to please you or to agree with you.”
“Seeking the solution in a customer interview is never going to work, right? You seek to understand and then you take that away and you can think through what the model should look like and how things should change as a result.”
“I watch people fall into that trap of assuming, especially when you're working at companies with lots and lots of data, you fall into the trap of thinking that you're swimming in answers because you have all this data and just need to tease it up. Just go out and talk, you'll find it faster.”
“When you're in a hypergrowth product, it's really important to understand who your users are today and what motivates them, but then also to understand who is the next user? Who is the user who could be using this product, but for some reason it doesn't work for them, and understanding who that adjacent user is.”
“User research is a scarce resource. We have to reserve it for the areas that have extreme uncertainty and high leverage for getting to certain. If you're redesigning the login page for Eventbrite, you don't need to use that resource to learn what to do. Just go see what FANG and the top unicorns did. They probably did a good job, and our customers use those products so they're going to be familiar with us copying any approach.”
“I like the strategy working group to actually either interview a user or watch a video and report key learnings. The idea is not to action those insights, it's really to build empathy. When you get somebody in the room with a user, it just changes their mind, it softens them a little bit. It gets them out of their own preconceived notions of what to build.”
“If you truly, truly want to solve a problem, get out of your building, get out of the assumptions, get out of your opinions. Immerse yourself, find someone who has the problem, stick with them until you discover a solution for this problem.”
“You need to put yourself in a particular user's shoes. It's actually important to have a very clear idea of who is the person I am kind of modeling the friction for right now. I will go through the process of actually using the product and make really careful and meticulous notes of what the experience is.”
When building algorithmic products, PMs must define what algorithms should handle versus what requires human judgment -- algorithms optimize but lack understanding of long-term effects and user intent.
Adriel FrederickZIRP phenomenon PMs are ill-prepared for resource-constrained environments - they've learned to follow frameworks and processes but can't use their brain to make decisions under uncertainty without data teams and research support.
Casey Winters 2.0Intuition is a hypothesis generator - constantly generate hypotheses, debate them with data, winnow down to working hypotheses
Dylan Field 2.0Growth requires real data (not 10 users) and proven PMF before you can experiment and optimize effectively
Elena Verna 3.0SEO should be treated as a product discipline, not just a marketing tactic -- product managers should own the SEO strategy because it requires understanding user journeys, building real experiences, and allocating engineering and design resources.
Eli SchwartzProduct market fit is not winning Product Hunt - it's when organic word-of-mouth growth takes off without any marketing spend, creating a self-sustaining growth engine
Grant LeeAI is democratizing software development from 5 million developers to 100 million potential builders by removing the need for specialized translation skills
Guillermo RauchBeware of user-centered performance -- research done to check a box rather than to genuinely learn is the most common and damaging pattern in product teams.
Judd Antin