Jag Duggal: preference

Transcript context

…I want to come back to one more thread and then I'm going to go in a different direction. You talked a bit about talking to customers, finding innovative ideas, not just listening to what they're telling you. There's this whole skill of user research and interviewing customers and finding the pain point, figuring out what to build. Do you have any just, I don't know, tips or tactics or lessons you've learned about just how to do this well, how to uncover the pain point and then figure out what to actually build when you're interviewing customers? I'll share a couple of thoughts, but I will tell you as a preface that it is arguably the area right now that I still wrestle with. I still think I, and we are not doing it as well. I've never seen it done quite as consistently great as it could be, and I think it's an area for where design thinking and a lot of the design function can help us, but it's very, very, it's one of the areas of greatest inconsistency that I see in product development. Having said that, a couple of things that I see that we sometimes do really well at Nubank and other times we miss on one dimension or the other. First off, per your Jeff Bezos anecdote, the anecdote usually trumps the data. And there are many times when I see teams that are doing very sophisticated analysis and they've sort of forgotten what the question is or what the conclusion they can draw from it truly is. So never lose sight of the value of the customer's words and the anecdote. That's one. The second one that I believe very, very strongly in is I think teams often skip the step of clearly, very, very clearly working very hard to be super crisp in articulating their hypothesis. If you don't have a hypothesis, you're going to spend a lot of time researching, you're going to get a lot of data back, qualitative, anecdotal or quantitative and you're not going to know what to make of it because it's not either validating or invalidating your hypothesis because there isn't a hypothesis. So it just becomes an interesting conversation. The third one is, I've got a hypothesis, I've got it really crisp and now the pitfall is I've fallen in love with my hypothesis. I'm a lawyer for my hypothesis. I'm not a judge of whether the hypothesis is right or not right. So I think that's another common pitfall. I've fallen into that one too many times to count. And then the last thing I would highlight is even when you have a strong hypothesis and you're actually in the mode of doing the research, observe more than ask questions if you can, ask indirect questions more than direct questions. Would you love this product? Right. Excited product manager has been working for two months on a design. You're searching for the problem more than the solution. You're looking indirectly and asking from multiple directions the same question rather than trying to find a yes, they love the thing you've been thinking about and swaying on for a long time. And if you can, observing is better than asking, although that's a tricky skill. Those are the things that I look for. With the hypothesis point, just to make sure people understand, your suggestion there is before you start talking to customers, doing your easy researches as a PM or just anyone on the team, essentially have a perspective on what you think is going to be true. Is that how you think about it?…

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