Product Research Rules

Foreword

As product-discovery practices mature, product researchers are renewing their emphasis on evidence-based decision making. Product teams strive to be customer-centric, data-informed, and hypothesis-driven. They are adopting more rigorous methods to capture decision inputs, relying on customer interviews, prototype testing, and behavioral analysis to better understand their customers. They are investing in better measurement techniques like split testing, monitoring traction metrics, and tracking cohorts over time to better understand the impact of what they are building.

As we see the popularity of these new research methods grow, we are also seeing wide variation in the level of success product teams are having with adopting and getting value from research. Few teams have members who are trained as scientists or in research methods. As a result, we see teams follow best practices outlined in blog posts or conference talks without a deep understanding of why or how these methods work. We see an overreliance on testing tools to do the scientific thinking for us. Most teams are following recipes rather than matching the right research method to their specific task.

Some product teams are supported by user researchers, data scientists, or business intelligence teams. In some companies, product teams farm out their research to these centralized teams and receive a research report in response. But it’s hard to act on research reports that are often generated on a different ...