Why Aren’t People Buying What You’re Trying to Sell Them?
Begin Solving Your Product/Market Fit Problem in 30 Minutes
Product/Market Fit is the holy grail of business success.
It’s the alignment between a product or service and its target user (market). Achieving Product/Market Fit is crucial for startups and businesses, as it validates the viability of their product and solidifies their target user. Achieving Product/Market Fit often requires continuous iterations, customer feedback, and adjustments to ensure the product aligns with the market’s needs and preferences.
If your target user isn’t buying, engaging, signing up, or adopting your product, you’re targeting the wrong market or user, or you have the wrong product. You don’t have Product/Market Fit, and you need to find it ASAP.
The first step in achieving Product/Market Fit is clearly identifying and understanding your target market. It is essential to deeply understand the customers you are trying to serve, their needs, preferences, and pain points. It involves conducting market research and gathering insights about your customers or potential customers.
If you’ve already launched your product and it’s not performing, use an Empathy Map to jumpstart your way to customer research and achieving Product/Market Fit:
Step 1:
Pull your team into a room and write down all the assumptions used to create your product. This could be things like: ‘they want the fastest experience possible’, or ‘they are really interested in this topic and want to do in-depth research’. It could also be something like ‘they want to connect with others like them’ or ‘they value personalization’. Whatever is true for you and your team.
Step 2:
Use an Empathy Map to document what you know about your user. An Empathy Map is a simple visual tool used to understand and empathize with the thoughts, feelings, needs, and behaviors of a particular user or target audience. Empathy Maps are informed by user research such as Ethnography, Observation, or Interviewing or, in the absence of research data, document the assumptions you made about your user.
Fill in each area of the map to document what a user says, thinks, feels, and does. Once you have done that, move on to their pains and gains. If you have user research, these will be facts; if you do not, these are assumptions or hypotheses.
Here is a template:
You should be able to complete these two steps in 30 minutes or less. If you’re struggling, you may want to consider the following:
- Why don’t I know this information?
- What do I need to do to get this information?
- Is my team agreeing? Why or why not? What are the differences in our opinions? What do we need to do to remedy these?
- Who else could I ask for this information? (ex. Should I ask the design team who they were designing for? Should I ask the sales and marketing team who they were trying to design for? etc.)
- How can we improve our understanding of our users to stay aligned?
Step 3:
Once you have completed an Empathy Map, you can take immediate action to improve your Product/Market Fit. This may include:
- Analyze and Synthesize: Review the information captured in the Empathy Map and identify patterns, common themes, and key insights. Look for recurring pain points, gains, needs, and emotions to understand the user’s perspective more deeply.
- Validate Assumptions: Reflect on the assumptions made during the empathy mapping process and compare them with user data or feedback. Assess whether the assumptions hold or need adjustment based on the collected insights.
- Complete User Research: Go into the field and get first-hand knowledge about your user or target user so you know what they really say, think, feel and do. Learn what their pains and gains are.
- Communicate and Share: Share the Empathy Map with the relevant stakeholders, such as team members, designers, developers, or decision-makers. Ensure that everyone involved understands the user’s perspective and insights gained from the empathy map.
- Ideation and Brainstorming: Use the Empathy Map as a springboard for generating ideas and solutions. Brainstorm potential improvements, features, or strategies that address the identified pain points, fulfill the user’s needs, and deliver the desired gains.
- Prioritize and plan: Evaluate the ideas generated and prioritize them based on feasibility, impact, and alignment with the user’s needs and goals. Develop an action plan or roadmap for implementing the identified improvements or changes.
- Iterate and refine: As the product or service evolves, revisit the Empathy Map periodically. Update it with new insights, user feedback, or changes in the user landscape. Continuously refine the understanding of the user and ensure that the product remains aligned with their needs.
- Test and validate: Implement the proposed changes or new features and collect user feedback through usability testing, surveys, or interviews. Use this feedback to validate the effectiveness of the improvements and refine them further.
By following these steps, individuals or teams can leverage the insights gained from the empathy map to inform decision-making, drive innovation, and create user-centered solutions that address the identified pain points, fulfill user needs, and deliver valuable gains.
Here’s an example:
The Situation
A team has developed a travel booking website; the design for the site was built based on the project team’s expertise, the business’s goals, and assumptions about what customers might want from a travel booking site. They have launched it to a pilot group of target customers. However, pilot users are going to the website but aren’t staying long or booking travel.
The site was designed based on three assumptions:
- Users prioritize affordability and look for budget-friendly travel options.
- Users value convenience and prefer a seamless booking experience.
- Users seek personalization and recommendations based on their travel interests.
The team has done some user research, although it focused primarily on demographics. They are now faced with a failing website and need to act quickly.
The Solution
Step 1:
Working together, the team identifies the assumptions they have already made about their target users and preferences. As we mentioned above, this team was using the following assumptions:
- Users prioritize affordability and look for budget-friendly travel options.
- Users value convenience and prefer a seamless booking experience.
- Users seek personalization and recommendations based on their travel interests.
Step 2:
The team reflects on their “target market” or user, using an Empathy Map to document their assumptions about this user. For this example, we’ll use a made-up user named “John.”
Assumed User: John
Following the creation of an Empathy Map, the team realized they didn’t know their user at all. They had no idea why their target users were coming to their website and how they thought or felt. Because of this, there was no way they could influence or help them.
For this team, It was time for them to go into the field and do Empathy Gathering, Observation, and Interviewing. The team will use these techniques to validate the assumptions they made about John (as shown in their Empathy Map) and any other users (one Empathy Map per user type).
Then they will compare their assumptions about these users against what they learn. This will give them clear direction on how to evolve or change their current website experience to meet their user’s needs better.
If you’d like to learn more about how you can use Empathy Maps and other design thinking tools and techniques, contact us or check out offerings and resources at NorthomeGroup.com.
Link: Learn more about Empathy Maps and download our Empathy Map template.
