Empowering new product development with contextual empathy

Sep 2023 – Nov 2023

🔍 Background

I joined a new product team working on operational technology (OT) in mid-2023. Operational technology (OT) heavily involves work and tasks in a physical factory or assembly line. I soon realized the team members didn’t have a shared knowledge of how the end users operate and what kind of environments they work in. I proposed a round of field studies to visit customers onsite to help the team develop shared contextual knowledge.

We assembled a team of two product managers and me. The team visited 3 customers to understand their pain points in their working contexts and gather feedback on our roadmap.

🗻 Process

I involved cross-functional teams from the beginning as we prepared for these customer visits. A Miro board was created to collect cross-functional partners – including PMs, designers, sales team, engineers, and content designers’ thoughts on aspects of our customers and end users that they would love to know more about.

We used a Miro to collect topics cross-func teams’ were interested in for the site visit. Blurred due to NDA.

The Miro board informed the set of interview questions and points for observation. To give cross-functional partners real-time updates on our journey, I created a Teams channel to share pictures, and ad-hoc learnings before we do the read-outs.

We eventually did two rounds of read-out, one in between, and one in the end. We attracted more than 10 attendees in each read-out as most of them had already previewed our findings and were intrigued to learn more.

🔭 Impact

  • Set the shared knowledge for the product team about customers’ needs and pain points in the context of their working environments.
  • Strengthened the relationships among cross-functional teams and between the product team and the sales team.
  • Further validated roadmap and involved our customer in the co-creation of our vision.

  • A bonus for the researcher: got leads to more research participants who are keen to give us feedback and share their lives with us :）

✍️ Lessons Learned

  • Involved cross-functional teams in the research process, especially when they had the chance to observe us doing the work helped “sell” the value of research.
  • Taking PMs and other functional teams in customer visits helped customers’ tough questions get answered, diversified our own learnings, and channeled research insights to support more decisions.
  • When visiting customers, research learnings can come from even just having small talks and relationship building.