The Agony Aunt Approach to Talking to Customers
The best way to understand your customer's biggest needs
To build better products you have to deeply understand your customer’s needs.
This is a fundamental principle of product management. All product managers have heard this advice and the very best PMs take it to heart. They understand that to build world-class products, you need to deeply understand who you are building for.
To understand your customer’s needs you need to talk to them. A lot. One of the best tips I can give for talking to your customers is to think of yourself as their Agony Aunt.
You see, most of the time when we talk to customers, we have some form of an agenda or focus for that interaction. We want to understand how usable a new feature is, we want to discuss a particular pain point etc.
These types of customer research are really important. However, if we only focus on research like this, we miss something important: We don’t let our customers talk about what they most want to talk about.
When we always set the topic for a discussion, we can miss the bigger picture. We can stop focusing on what is truly most important to our customers and start focusing on what we think is most important to them.
This is where the agony aunt approach can be really powerful.
The Agony Aunt Approach
The agony aunt approach is a simple method of customer engagement. It works as follows:
Set up some regularly recurring meetings with a few of your customers/users.
Start with 2-4 customers and schedule the meetings for the same day every 2-4 weeks.
Don’t set an agenda for the meeting. Tell your customers that you would like to set up a regular meeting to understand their needs so you can learn how to improve the product for them. Most customers will love the chance to be heard.
Focus on just listening to your customers. Let them guide the discussion as much as possible.
The first meeting or two may be slightly awkward. Your customers may not know what to say. To encourage discussion, ask open-ended questions like “How has your week been at work?”, “How are you finding the product?” or “Have you been busy at work?”.
Once you get over the initial hump, agony aunt meetings are incredibly, incredibly insightful. Your customers will start telling you about their pain points at work, what they like about your product, what they wish could be improved etc.
Most importantly, by allowing your customers to control the discussion, they will naturally gravitate to talking about what matters to them most. They will talk about their core motivations for using your product, their biggest needs, their biggest pain points.
It is true that to build better products you have to deeply understand your customer’s needs. But to build the best products, you need to understand your customer’s biggest needs. The agony aunt approach helps you to do just that.
Implementing the agony aunt approach has probably been the single best improvement I’ve made in my career as a PM to date. I’ve been doing them for about 6 months and my product intuition has hugely improved. I’ve become better in almost every aspect of my job. I can’t recommend this approach enough so please give it a try.
If you want to give the agony aunt approach a try and have any questions, please reach out. I’d be happy to help.