Delight Internal Customers With Product Discovery by Amazon Sr PM, Rita Sathe

Definitions

  • Internal Products are the products that solve problems for internal users/colleagues of the company (Sales, Servicing, Marketing, Engineers) and enable them to better serve the end customers.

  • Product Discovery is a process that help product teams refine their ideas by deeply understanding “real customer problems or needs” and then landing on the best way to solve them.

  • UX User experience designers work to optimize the interaction between humans and products responsible for research, design, user testing and more.

Why internal product?

  • Employees are limited resources and expect better tools and experience.

  • Employee Satisfaction is key for organization's success

  • Sales and Servicing colleagues are the frontline for our end customers.

  • Internal products often remain on legacy platforms.

  • Internal customer journeys are often manual and multi-step.

Success of Product

  • Customer Satisfaction CSAT or NPS score

    Improved customer experience as measured by the CSAT or NPS customer satisfaction score

  • Minimal training

    Intuitive experiences and self-learning can help early adoption of rapid user adoption, which can be measured through product adoption, engagement, and retention.

  • Efficiency & Productivity

    This provides business value to the organization, which will lead to end customer satisfaction.

Risk types in Product Management

Product decisions are made probably monthly, weekly, minute by minute.
As part of product discovery, we need to mitigate three types of risk:
- desirability
- viability
- feasibility
By reducing these three risks, we can innovate and create products our customers cannot live without.

Product Discovery

Product discovery has two main parts:

- problem space (helps to identify the right problem)
- decision space (helps the product team solve the problem of the product correctly)
Contribution to product discovery is either a business challenge or a business goal.
With the help of user research, interviews, analysis of focus group data, we can determine who our client is, what are his motives, goals, pain points.
After listing the problems, the next step is to define the problem. This is addressed by your product based on the impact of the value it brings to the customer.
The result of the problem space can be a certain vision, a statement of a hypothesis, a business case. Then enter into a decision space where you come up with different ideas.
Create a prototype, which can be as simple as a working prototype with markup, or can be a flow that mimics the work of an end user.
After creating a prototype, test it with clients using user testing to check its usability. After testing, you will have a well-defined client problem with a proven solution to build and run.

Product Discovery Trio

The product manager, UX designer and technical lead should be responsible for the product result, interview customers, create ideas, test the prototype. All of them should be involved in the product search process.

Discovery Method

In this scenario, customers are involved throughout the product life cycle. And it helps us in iterative learning and making sure we don't have any unknown client needs that have been deprioritized.
Keeping customers at the center of the product life cycle helps us create a product our customers cannot live without.

Customer Service Optimization – Sample

Key Takeaways

  • Start with the Customer outcome and work backwards

  • Have recurring meetings with the customer for incremental learnings

  • Involve Product, Engineering and UX in Product Discovery

  • Have a continuous feedback loop with customers

  • Tailor discovery method that works for you and your team

“Winning products come from the deep understanding of the user's needs combined with an equally deep understanding of what's just now possible.” - Marty Cagan

Rita Sathe, Amazon Sr PM