INSPIRED, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 14The Supporting Roles

So far, we've talked about your role as product manager, and we've also talked about the designers, engineers, and product marketing managers you'll be working with very closely every day.

But there are other people in supporting roles you'll also work with. These people will probably not be dedicated solely to your team, as they are typically assigned to a small number of other product teams.

Now, you might not have any of the people I'm about to describe available to you. It really depends on the size and type of organization you work at. If you're at a small startup, you very probably will have none of these roles, and you will need to cover these activities yourself. But if you're at a company that has some or all of these roles, I want you to know why they exist and, most important, how to make the best use of these people.

User Researchers

As you'll soon see when we talk about how we do product discovery, we are continuously doing two kinds of rapid learning and experimentation. One kind of learning is qualitative, and the other is quantitative.

Especially with the qualitative learning, some of our research is generative, which is understanding the problems we need to solve; and some of our research is evaluative, which is assessing how well our solutions solve the problem.

User researchers are trained in this range of qualitative techniques (and some of them are also trained on the quantitative techniques as well). They can help you find ...