Product Answers #4: Why do we need weekly user sessions if we have no questions to be answered?
This question came up by a product lead during a speach I gave on continuous discovery. He was unsure whether or not the efforts of setting up and spending time in regular user interactions would bring large enough benefits to the team.
During a speach I gave on continuous discovery at a mid-sized organisation, I raised the importance of frequent user interaction for the product team (product manager, product designer, engineers). Continuous discovery is the method of identifying new opportunities and validating potential solutions with prototypes before the actual product needs to be built. While doing discovery, teams not only learn what works and what doesn’t, but regularly gain new insights that build the basis for the next round of validation. When product teams mature, they will work in a continuous discovery and continuous delivery mode. Validating future solutions and shipping improvements to current solutions multiple times a week, if not day. This muscle needs to be built over time, while a weekly cadance is considered the bare minimum for a team.
I believe you can only fully understand the power of user interaction, when you start doing it. This makes it so hard to convince organisations that have never done it before. “We know what needs to be done”, is one of those reactions I hear regularly. Once a team started to perform regular user interactions, they never want to go back. At first it hurts to get underwhelming reactions to your ideas from potantial customers. But once you understand that this will speed up the process of finding valuable solutions by weeks and months (e.g. you do not need to wait for a feature being built anymore to understand if it will work), you don’t want to miss it.
Suddenly the whole team understands that they can be faster and spare themselves from developing features no one will use anyway. They get faster than the other teams in the organisation and get recognised. If more and more teams work like this, the faster the organisation gets compared to the competitors. There is no reason to go slower again.
The benefits clearly outweight the efforts involved. I bet, you and your teams come back energised and with a much better understanding of how the envisioned solution will work for the customer. Not only new insights are generated, but a lot of follow-up questions as well. A situation, where the teams think they have no more questions to clarify, sounds absurd afterwards.
Start simple: spend half a day per week with 3-4 user sessions. Once you are rolling, reduce the preperation efforts step by step, e.g. by creating a user pool instead of recruiting every single user. If you can, include one person who has done this before (most likely there is someone in your organisation). This will avoid making the most obvious mistakes yourself. The most important step is to start. And there is no excuse for leaders or product teams not to start this week.