User Research

“Snap didn't like user research as a function for the longest time. Like, I think there was one user researcher in the company until again, 5000 employees, like post IPO basically.”

“Put more weight on past experiences than on people's predictions of what they would do.”

“I've wasted twice, twice. I've wasted an entire quarter of a growth team's time because of my poor use of user research.”

“You can do user research along the way, but, you know, the reality is that, that users lie when you talk to them, and they will always tell you what they think you want to hear.”

“Like, I know PM should settle for looking through bent glass, in my opinion, because whether it's a research report, whether it's something a salesperson is telling you, whether it's market research, don't care. It's been processed by someone, and PMs need dir…”

“Instead of doing user research, talking to customers, informing what to build, it's talking to user, talking to customers, informs your mental model of what the customer needs. And then that informs what to build.”

“As the products grow, you tend to leverage a lot more user research, formal user research, or CSAT surveys, and the way I call it, it's hiding behind research. And not being close enough to the ground with customers.”

“And then you have this middle range, which is this blobular place where the research questions are sort of middle altitude. And a lot of the core kind of, let's say user understanding questions fall here. And a lot of what research is doing is research in that…”

“So the best researchers I think are, first of all, multi-method. The first iteration of user research was primarily a qualitative discipline, but a strong opinion that I have is that is largely one of those models that needs to evolve. It's not that qualitativ…”

“Every time a PM comes to a researcher at the end of a product process and says, can you just run a quick user study, you know, just to validate our assumptions. That's user centered performance. It's too late to matter. That PM is not interested in being wrong…”

“Like one of my big kind of mantras was we don't validate, we falsify. Right? We are looking to be wrong. That is the mindset you should use when you're approaching insights and research. I want to be wrong. I want you to do research that shows we were off base…”

“The best research doesn't like leave it at that. Right? It tells you, and it's like the what, the so what, and then the then what. But the problem with that is some researchers go too far in the other direction where they're like, we ran the study, it yielded …”

“Feeling the pain firsthand is just like this next level of visceral understanding of like, oh, this could be better. And your users, you know, they might not always say what's missing or what's wrong, or maybe they don't, you know, they don't know that certain…”

“Go into the, that meeting expecting the user to sell you on the product rather you selling them. Like your default skepticism should be so high that the user is actually trying to convince you that this thing is necessary.”

“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.”

“The more scale you have, Tends to be, you have less sophisticated customers because you're generally like, you know, consumer thing where the customers are rational. They're not experts. And that's generally where you just try things. You measure the impact th…”

“We're in the business of changing behavior, not seeking new knowledge, and we have really good feedback loops. And so we can make decisions based on small experiments. Because we're going to continue to get bigger feedback loops and more reliable data over tim…”

“We are not just trying to find out, you know, if they like it. In fact, it's just the opposite. It's we are, when we're doing user research, we're finding all the reasons they don't like it.”

“It's not. Centralizing user research as a practice. It's helping to scale user research so that we can enable more people to do user research, especially when you get into some of these companies.”

“A classic rule of research and talking to customers is you never want to focus on what people might do because we're really bad at predicting what we will do.”

“You're not like, hey, here's a product. Do you like it? Because then when you ask that question, it leads people to say, yeah, okay. They don't want to hurt your feelings, right? They don't want to say, no, I hate it. So you want to understand, like, is this a…”

“I always recommend if, you know, maybe have someone who isn't involved, If it's your baby, you're like, oh my gosh, like, I really want them to like this. So having someone who's a little bit detached is always good”

“You could ask an open-ended question that's like, you know, what do you like about this product? All right, that's leading, right? Because you're already leading them to say that they like something about the product. They might not like anything about it. So …”

“My sales guys are bringing back information to HQ. You, but they're not really listening. They're selling. And they're listening for the name of the competitor, for the problem that matches the use case, because they have that great line about this feature, wh…”