How to Make Customer Insights An Integral Part of Product Development & Company Strategy with Asana

Alright, so as Lindsay mentioned, I'm here to talk to you about how to incorporate the customer perspective throughout the product development lifecycle. Not just at the roadmap boundary, but how do you incorporate it throughout and at any scale. So if you're a really small company, if it's just you, or if you're really big and you have a lot of resources, I can talk to you about strategies to handle at any scale. Here we go. Here's what we're going to talk about. I'm going to give you a quick intro about me. You probably read a little bit about me in my bio, but I'll give you a little bit more context for why I'm talking to you today about this topic and about the topic itself, why I think it's so important that we, that we talk about it. So I'm going to do a quick interlude on the Double Diamond process. Many of you are probably familiar with it, but I'm going to be referencing it, so I just want to make sure that we're grounded on how I'm talking about it and interpreting it. And then I'll talk quickly about the needs framework. So like how you can think about the type of needs that your customers are having or potential customers. Just know when I say customers, I mean the ones you have now and the ones that you'll be getting. So the not yet customers. And then how you can cultivate those insights from the customers that you want to hear from. Throughout the year. I'm gonna give you examples about how we're doing this at Asana right now. So I'm gonna walk you through some very specific ways that we're doing it. And then I'm gonna give you an example of how you might plot these tactics over the course of a year. So essentially your product development and planning lifecycle. And then we'll talk about how that could apply to you. If there are things that you feel like you need to adjust because you are a smaller team or you don't have resources or you have a lot of resources and you wanna figure out how to adjust them, We can talk about those too. But as Lindsay mentioned, you should feel free to pop questions in as you go. If something's not clear, I'm happy to clarify and adjust as we go. So here we go.

Me.

So I'm at Asana right now. We are the kind of like a workflow, work management tool. So you may be familiar with that. I am the technical head of experience research there, but I'm also wearing a second hat right now, which is to be a PM lead in one of our pillars. So I'm kind of doing double duty there. I have an academic background in design and IA and research. And this is just to kind of show you the range of experience that I have, everything from consultancies to bigger, more established organizations to startups. Healthcare, had my own business for a while, and some kind of more stoic names that you might be aware of, retail to shopping to travel. So it's a, it's a pretty big range. And like I said, I'm here at Asana, and you'll see these little things are to say that I've also started 3 teams. So I've started 3 research teams in big organizations all the way to Asana, and now we're growing here. I tell you all that because I want you to know that I'm not coming to you as a user researcher or a qualitative person to say that you need to build more customer empathy. You do need to do that, but I'm coming from a perspective of a wide range of experiences, like I said, from PM to design to experience research. And I'm not going to be giving you examples that only research research teams can do. Anybody should be able to do this. So why do I think this is important? In my experience, what I've observed is that often the way that we're doing our product planning and our product cycle is status quo is just not working. We end up working all year, we're build, build, build, ship, ship, ship, and we do these great things. But what ends up happening is the roadmap planning process comes up, and we're like, oh my gosh, we have to start planning now. What do we know about our customers? What have we learned lately? That is recency bias and reactive. So that means that we lead to half-baked ideas. So that means ideas that you think are good enough, ideas that you feel like you can ship and learn on. But you— we put the onus on our customers. I mean, for sure, we want to ship things out there, and we do have to ship and learn. But so often it leads to this situation where you get it out there and you feel like you're giving a gift to the customer when really it's not considering the full experience. Or you're going to learn at their expense. You know, like, congratulations, here's a new feature when they've just gotten used to the old way of doing things. The other thing that I notice is missed opportunities to innovate. You're in reaction mode when you pop your head up and you're at product or your roadmap boundary, and you're trying to collect the information that you know. But if you had been planful throughout the year, you could have an opportunity to innovate, and that's cool. This is my— this is why I'm super excited about this, is because that not only do you get to innovate for your customers, that when you innovate and when you have planned space to innovate and you're predicting it, then your team is excited too. It's a virtuous cycle, right? Like you get to ship and deliver amazing things, but your team gets to work on really cool, amazing things and not be reactive order takers. Okay, here is the Double Diamond interlude that I mentioned. Again, you may be familiar with it, but just a quick overview. So this is how we operate and ship from the product org in our Atasana. You may be too. We didn't invent this. It's been around for a really long time. But the idea is that whatever your space is, we're in the collaboration and workflow management space, you spend the first D kind of discovering what are the pains around your customer types, how deeply are they felt, who are your customers. And then you spend the second D defining those things, getting narrow and saying, OK, which pain are we going after? And which customer specifically are we going to go after? And then your second space is your solution. So it's like, how— what are all the ways that we could solve this problem for these customers? And then you define the way that you uniquely can solve the problem for this customer type. What is your right to solve and how? And then you launch and learn. And then you iterate. But you do that down here, not up there. Okay. Needs framework. So here's a simple way to kind of think about the types of needs that your customers may be experiencing. This one you're probably familiar with. It's the now needs. It's the fix this now. The thing that you shipped wasn't ready. I have a new idea now that I'm using it. I would like to have you evolve it this way. And then there are the future needs. I've got this problem, and you might hear it's a little bit more ambient. They can't put their finger on it. They're not able to name it, and that, that's a very interesting space to be in, but you do need to do both. Oftentimes people spend and get stuck here because, again, that's what's easiest because it feels a little bit hard to plan here, but I'm going to give you some techniques that I think you should be able to apply right away so that you can get a little bit more into this space. Okay, so now needs. These are the ones that, that are pushed to you. Those are things that you probably maybe have a call center or sales, customer success. All those things are things that can be pushed to you that are already happening. Those are things that I think you should try and automate. Then there are pulled. These are the ones that, that you can pull. They're a little bit harder to, to get, a little bit more ambient, but you have to go seek them out. But they can also be planned, and I'll talk about how you might plan those out too. Okay, here are some specific examples for how we're doing these things at Asana right now. And you can— we can talk about how and if they would work for you. These are my— I think I have two favorites here, but I also have some at the end, other ones, examples that we can go after if there's time. So this is a push that we have. We obviously use our own product, but you don't have to. What we've done is we've automated two important signals from our customers. One is the— churn survey, and one is our NPS. So every Monday, I get a digest here of the, of 10 random NPS pieces of feedback, random scores from all over the world. They're just 10. They're not organized in any particular way, not like the top 10 or anything like that. On Friday, I get the same thing, but for churn surveys. Why are people leaving Asana? Every week. So I start to build up a pattern, and it's not just me, anybody can sign up for these. So I start to build a pattern of MPS without having to pull a report or go, go seek it myself. It just comes to me. It just sort of washes over me twice a week. So I ambiently am picking up on these patterns and themes. The other one that I think is really cool that we've just implemented recently has been immensely helpful is the VOC, the Voice of the Customer consult. So you may be familiar with the concept of a voice of the customer, which is kind of like getting a sense from all of your customer-facing folks, and then there's synthesis. And I can talk to you about how we do it also, because I have that example at the end. But this one is really interesting because it's on demand. You pull it. So what happens for us is we use a form, use Asana, but you can use Google Forms, and we submit to, um, to to the facilitator of this function of the VOC consult. We say, hey, we have this theme. We want to know about reporting, for example. You may want to know about something else, but we say we want to know about reporting. And so that consult sends something to all of the representatives— sales, customer success, user operations, which is our call center. I think that's all of our folks. And so they pull and they say, here's what I know, here's what I'm hearing from my customers. And so we schedule a meeting and we have essentially a debrief or a synthesis session where we pull all these people together under one topic, and then we make sense of what they're hearing, like look for patterns, try and understand a little bit more. So it's sort of a quick channel under a single theme. To our customers without having to schedule and go to them directly. I do advocate talking to your customers directly, but this is a way that you don't have to. And then we have an output of, like, what are the themes that we heard, and a conversation about those things. This has been so super helpful, and like I said, we've only implemented it in the last year, but it's been really great. Okay, so here's the future needs. These are the ones that we need to have a little bit more planning for because they're the ones that are just a little bit more ambient. We have to listen a little bit more closely too. So you can, you can do them in kind of two ways, either organizationally, but you can also do like activity spikes throughout. So I talked to you about the double diamond For the future needs, we want to operate here more often. And what that looks like are things like some set of people or individuals who are aligned to a particular topic. For example, an innovation area. Ours would happen to be— an innovation area would be a knowledge worker. It's super wide open space. Collaboration is another big space. So you might have someone organized or a team organized around that. When I say AOR or team, area of responsibility, that means like one person owns that particular topic or theme. Asana has a pretty robust AOR system, so we leverage that here, and I can talk a little bit more about that. Team or function might be if you have a UXR team, You might organize them orthogonally to your product org. So not aligned, like if your product org is already organized by journey type or by product area, you might have your UX or your strategy team organized orthogonally to that group and have them be a part of an innovation area or a strategy or a big fat. It's another way to do it. So for example, a big bet is if we put more people on the ground in each office area who understand how collaboration works on a one-on-one basis, we win by being the experts in that area and getting the mindshare of whatever. You fill in your own template for what those are. At Asana, we also operate on big bets, and they ladder up to our mission. So they kind of ladder up. But this works too. If you're in a pinch and you want to— if you don't have easy access or you just don't have the resources, this activity will also work. And I'll talk to you about how practically that has worked for us. Okay, this is the ad hoc one that I just mentioned. So maybe you're familiar with it, um, it's an Airbnb kind of activity. They came up with it, I think, but it's very practical and could be really fun too. So quickly, here's how it works is whatever your product area is, you might ask, what does it look like to ship good enough. And like I mentioned, that's often where we are, is like, what is good enough so that we can get it out the door? For us, we went through this exercise for adoption. What would it look like for onboarding a new customer to our way of work? What would it look like to be good enough? Then you go, OK, what's 5-star? What's excellent look like? And conceptually, I think everybody understands that, like, the more stars the better, right? If you're on Yelp, you want to, you want to eat at a restaurant that's like 4.5 stars. You don't want to eat at a restaurant that's like 1.5 stars. So it's kind of a universally understood quality scale. Also note that if you build, if you are saying what you want to, to do, you, you often end up a few stars, 1 or 2 stars below what you actually plan for. So if you're like, what's good enough? What you actually ship will probably be closer to 2 or 1. So just think about that whole half-baked idea I mentioned. And then you go for like, but what's an 11-star experience like? Like, what is the most unexpected and beyond imagination thing that you could come up with? You know, you can— and I have a link to the Airbnb activity. But, you know, when you think about— when they were thinking about what would be the best experience, why do people travel, you know, it's like, um, what if when you went to the Airbnb, um, you know, in Italy, the grandma greeted you and then she took you on a family tour of all the places that you— that, um, she grew up in and, um, and ate, and you had all these wonderful family meals? Um, that's obviously not scalable, um, but you can imagine that what came out of that was something like the Airbnb Experiences. Which is, which is, uh, gangbusters right now. You don't actually have to go to an Airbnb to have this really amazing experience. So you can kind of see how that might parlay to like something which seems, um, impossible. You can end up with something actually workable. And so the idea there is your workback plan, right? Like, this is like, what's the most amazing thing? And then you go back and say, how are we going to get there? What's our incremental progress going to be? Another one is the ideation spike. This is where you spend a few days taking in all the information and absorbing the information that you have gotten from your AORs or your teams who have been focused around whatever your innovation area was. Absorb that, do some ideation and sketching around that, and that feeds into your roadmap. And now I'm going to show you what all those things that I do, all those examples, could look like on a planned schedule, and then we'll have time for some conversation. Okay, so remember where I— when I told you we— like, why I was so inspired by this topic, because of the cramming last minute and the shipping of not excellent product and being reactive. I think that if we can be planful, then we can move to a world where there is space for creativity and we balance the learning with the serving. You could come up with category-defining experiences. And let's not forget, my favorite part here is that it's this virtuous cycle that you become a company that's known for inspiration and you reward the growth of your people. So they want to work there. They want to deliver really amazing stuff. They do deliver amazing stuff. Your customers love you. It's just one big, wonderful thing. Okay. I'm going to go over this example of like how you might be able to put this on, on your calendar, your company calendar. Most people do road mapping planning around this time. That's what we do. So that I'm going to just start there because it's a common place. So imagine that you are doing your roadmap planning, like What are we going to put on next year's roadmap? And around the November, December area timeframe. If this is true, then this is the ideation week that I just mentioned. And the input to that is your AOR, or your strategy team, or your UXR team who says, hey, I've got some new things I want to tell you, a new perspective on the world of collaboration, or I want to tell you about how AI is playing a role right now in workflows. So that feeds into the ideation week. In ideation week, you come up with the sketches and everything that I mentioned. And that feeds into what, what could possibly be on our roadmap. Also note, these are those MPS, those like weekly things that I've been telling you. So all, all year, you've got these patterns in your head. And you've had a voice of customer that goes in and it goes in. Now in January and February, you're starting to think about how, how are we going to execute on these big ideas that we have? You're still getting your input, your weekly, your weekly here. This is another AOR or team share, except for instead of like, hey, let me tell you about the, the world of work, let me tell you about how you might be able to apply and think about these things when you're thinking about what you're going to build and how you're going to build it. So it's a slightly different take, but it's still also a bit big, big picture. It's just instead of what, it helps inform your, your how. So anytime you can have ad hoc customer interviews, right? But now you're starting to figure out how you're going to build on your roadmap, and you kind of do some, a little bit of thinking and innovating here. Maybe your space, you've got a little bit of space to do a little bit more thinking and building. Now you might have a little bit more sense of the kinds of things that you want to get more narrow on. So maybe you have a voice of customer consult or customer panel, which I can also talk about, to kind of get more input and see, am I getting the, do I have the right direction in mind? Then you might say, okay, now I feel like I've got all the pains, I understand the empathy. Now, what would great look like? What would excellent look like? Could we jam on what that might look like? Maybe you do a hackathon that says, okay, could we bear this out? What might this really experience like? Maybe you then can do a customer jam that says, hey, we have some ideas. Can you be a part and do a little bit of co-creation with us? So that is how I could imagine this playing out. It's pretty much how we incorporate the customer input through the Asana lifecycle. Of course, there are many teams operating at many different cadences, so this would be very, very full. But imagine just one small team that you would have that would be able to plan your roadmap. And then there you are back at planning your next roadmap again, but now you are so much more informed because you've made it a part of your day-to-day. All right. So here are two things that I think you can do right away, no matter what your size of your teams are. These are my favorites, and I think that they're pretty low lift so that you can do them. One is the VOC consult. No matter what size of company you are or what resources, somebody's talking to customers— sales, you are the sole proprietor, you are, like, you have these channels. There are sites where people are giving feedback on things. So there are ways to pull this information. So I think this is a really cool way to get insights quickly. And then the other is the AORs. Even if you don't have a huge organization framework around that, you don't have to. The cool thing about this, about having an AOR, is even if it's just one person, you get the benefit of having an area of expertise. Somebody will be looking into like, okay, what does this innovation area mean? Or we have a couple of big bets. We can give one to each person. You'll be informed because they'll be doing this work. It's not a full-time job, but still you'll be more informed than you probably were before and have shared understanding. Plus, going back to this whole team thing and people being really excited, it's an area of growth. You've given someone some, some responsibility on the team. They could— they are probably going to get more visibility because of their subject matter expertise in here. So again, it's a win-win. It's a win-win thing. And then here are a couple of resources if you want to read about or listen to the 11 Star Experience. There's a great podcast on from our episode on the Masters of Scale that they did on this. It was really great. And then this book is A More Beautiful Question. It talks about how to come up with questions that are really big and kind of amorphous, but get at them, have action out of them. And I think it's a really great book. Okay, so now I gave you a lot of information. Interested to hear what your perspective is and if you want to jam on any of this stuff to make it more useful for you.

Great. Thanks, Beth. And just a reminder for those of you joining us, whether you're— if you're in the event platform and you have the option to join us on stage, the button below the player, and that will actually allow you to turn on, come into the room with Beth and all of us, turn on your camera, your audio, and actually ask Beth directly. In the meantime, we have a handful of questions that we've already received. What I'd ask is actually, Beth, can you stop sharing your screen so people can see you and you can see others? And I will start sharing or reading off a few of the great questions that we've already gotten in from our audience. So first question would be, how do you find and pick customers to give feedback in a balanced way? And avoid listening to only the most vocal customers?

Yeah, that's a perennial question. It's a tricky one. I think that's the pull. So you have to go find them because the ones that are vocal are writing in to you. They're the ones who are submitting your low MPS or your high NPS. So I would say deprioritize those push channels and, and go for your pull channels and basically proactively go find the people that you feel you haven't heard from. Sometimes they can be hard, and sometimes it comes down to just relationships, and sometimes you have to pay them. There are other things though that they are— that they'd be grateful to talk to you because no one talks to them. Show them a little bit of your roadmap. Like, make them feel like they're going to get something out of this for their participation. Got it.

Great. We had another attendee ask or say, "I like the idea of ambient information, but I'm assuming you're also looking at reports because those digests don't seem adequate on their own." Can you speak to that?

100%. Absolutely. We look at the reports all the time. This is just one way that, like I said, it takes me all of 2 minutes. And the other thing that we do is I can tag people in just the way, because of the way Asana works. If I see, oh wait, somebody is having a real problem with this, or here's another way to find people. They're still vocal, but they might have filled out an NPS and mentioned something about a feature that we're working on. And I can say, hey, you can dig in and look here. So I can also make connections to people. So it serves that purpose. It's ambient, but 100%, we are pulling the reports proactively and not just relying on that.

Great. Next question. Since everyone at Asana uses Asana, clearly, how do you take internal feedback into account alongside your external customers?

So, yes. There are some products where that works really well because you use them very much the same way, but Asana does not use Asana the way other people use it. So we do dog food, so we do— everything kind of goes through us, but we do happen to have a research team, so we're able to put that into perspective, and we really do We say like, here's what we heard internally, but let's take that with a grain of salt. It's usually for like bugs and those kinds of things. We keep it in mind, but we don't put nearly the same emphasis on it as we do for our external customers. If we do need to get that perspective early on, we'll talk to non-product people. So we might go to culinary, or we might go to sales, because sales has a huge external tool workflow that they use. So we'll reach there, but we really have to put it into perspective because we just, we don't use it like the rest of people. Got it.

Okay, next question. Do you believe that your most challenging customers, difficult to satisfy, are the most important to listen to, or should be taken in stride? Do they distract or do they focus us?

I think everybody is important, but similar to the last question, we have to put them into perspective because just— was the question most— what was the first part? Most important? Most—

do you believe that your most challenging customers, most difficult to satisfy, are they the most important to listen to?

They— I think it just depends on what they're saying. Because if they're challenging, then that's— then that can be really good, right? Like, then they're making us better. We just have to be very conscious and mindful about what they're saying and that hard to please doesn't mean loud or that we're going to end up making the best the enemy of the good. It's— I think you just have to have a super mindful approach and it can be really easy to get distracted. With those people. But I think you run the risk, and it sounds like this person who is asking understands that you run the risk of perfecting a single person's or a single way of doing things instead of being good for a range of people. So I think you have to really consider how they contribute to the rest of what your audience and customer needs are.

Next one. What are some of the incentives you recommend for collecting those kind of pull insights that you might offer to your client or design partner, to your client design partners?

Incentives, like when we're trying to find participants or trying to find customers, like how would we compensate them?

Yes, that's how I'm reading it too.

Okay, so it super depends on who they are. And how hard they are to find. But you could go anywhere from financial incentives, which could be super expensive. An executive in this particular industry, or you need to talk to doctors or something, they can be super expensive to get. And they may cost you hundreds of dollars an hour. Although beware, not everybody can accept money. But I think on the other end of the spectrum is people do feel rewarded by being on a panel. So you might have a very particular group that doesn't get heard from very much, but if you put them on a panel and say, hey, we're going to like address a particular set of features to you, They'll feel very special because you're making them very special, and people feel rewarded for that too. You can have them spend time with your product manager, like looking at the roadmap and kind of getting feedback on that. That is another way to reward people. So it doesn't always have to be financial, but sometimes you have to throw money at the problem. That works too. Fair enough.

Next question. Any tips for a SaaS company with few large customers, rather than Asana's thousands of users? A weekly churn report for that type of company would not make any sense. Any thoughts there, ideas?

So a few larger companies. Well, it depends on what you're wanting to know. But that is a good— I could see a panel working for that. So you have a few people from each. If you only have 3 large customers or 3 large companies, you might get a handful of people from each or a few from each. What can be good there is oftentimes SaaS or really, really large companies like to network with each other and learn from each other. So that's also a benefit that you could offer and say, hey, you'll get to learn from an and experience other people in this environment and learn how— for us, it has worked too. It's like, how do you use Asana for your thing? Or how do you use it for the way you're doing things? And so they get to learn from each other too. So I think for larger customers, that would work.

Great. And just a reminder for those on the line, whether you're in our event platform, you could just drop a question into the questions section on the right rail. As well as those that are with us, you can just unmute yourself and ask Beth a direct question if you'd like, or drop it in chat and we'll continue this great Q&A. Beth, another question for you. What technologies do you recommend for qualitative research?

So again, it depends on your question, but I can tell you some of the things that we use at Asana, or that I've used. So you can use things that are like async or unmoderated, like usertesting.com. There are a couple even lower-fi things and cheaper that are really good. UserWorks, I think, might be the name of it. I can follow up with, with that one then. I've really liked that one. It depends on if you're doing the research and you're a researcher, or if you are a product manager and you're doing that. There are some really great things where you just do use Zoom, and you can use hand sketches and be like, hey, is this what you were talking about? I just drew the thing that you said. Did that work? That's one of my favorites, because people feel like you're really hearing them and you're co-creating, and that feels really good instead of it just being kind of an interview. And we also use Mural a bunch, which is like a sticky note kind of a thing that has been really useful for us. Those have been the— like, I think those are the ones that are kind of like the lowest fi, easiest to access. I tend towards the lower fi stuff and just even use like Google Sheets and just kind of like draw out boxes and move boxes around and see like that kind of thing. We can annotate. So yeah, it depends on your question that you're asking, but those are the ones that we're using right now.

Great. We've got a few more. This is actually a very specific Asana question. How do you, how do you use Asana to manage incoming tickets?

So we, like I said, they sort of like come through, like I don't, that's our UI team. And so they manage like ongoing tickets that way. And they funnel into Asana. Again, we've written a script so that they come in and I can theme them. But that is one of our kind of like one of many inputs that we take. But from my team's perspective, like I said, for those summaries, I'm able to tag people in and say, hey, you should look at this. This is a thing that adds to your— you may not have been on this. I want you to see this. For what it's worth, we also do that with Twitter. So we figured out a way to put Twitter— figured out a way— it's probably not that hard. But I'm the qualitative person here. But we pipe in Twitter so we can kind of like track Twitter and we can kind of see patterns there. There are all kinds of cool things that you can do from keeping tabs on social media too for themes. But my team, from a UXR standpoint, uses Asana for everything. So if you wanted to hear like what were all the themes that we saw from our adoption research, you would just search in Asana. We communicate about our research in there too, so we use it to house and to communicate about the findings that the UXR team in particular does too. And same with Voice of Customer.

Great. Thank you for sharing that. Looks like we've got through most, or actually all of our questions. So I'm just going to do one last ask if anybody has a last-minute question for Beth and does want to drop it into the question chat box or unmute. This is your final chance. All right, well, I would love to thank you, Beth, for joining us at SaaStr Build today. This was a great session, and for all of you that joined as well, thank you for participating and hope that you enjoy the upcoming sessions next.

Thanks.

Have a great afternoon, evening.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.