Ugrás a fő tartalomra

You can't get right answers if you're asking the wrong questions

As I have been in Business Analyst (BA) and Product Owner (PO) positions for a long while, customer focus and feedbacks were always quite important for me. I am working at a company where we, POs can't really talk directly to clients (our end users) - or just once in a while. But luckily there are people at the company whose profession is talking to clients. But we POs obviously always want to be closer to clients, willing to be involved in client meetings as many times as possible, because that makes a lot of sense when it comes to implementing stuff based on client feedbacks. So we want to talk to clients directly, because we think we know the most about our product (as we are the owners of it, right?) so who could be more appropriate than us to talk to the client?
Well.. Today a phone call changed my mind... 

We have a weekend house and sometimes ago the pipes broke in the wall. We have insurance so I immediately logged this incident online. The insurance's online system was quite a surprise, it was easy to find everything and quick to log the incident there (comparing to logging a similar event few years ago in the same system, they improved a lot I think). So, I was satisfied with the user experience.

A few days after logging this incident I got an email from the insurance company to give them feedback about their online system. "Ok, I love giving feedbacks, so I definitely will give feedbacks for them but first I wait for the incident to be solved." - I thought. So I marked the email as a to-do. But they kept sending me reminder emails to fill in the form...

As I dont like outstanding tasks in my inbox, especially when more are about the same thing, I decided to fill in the feedback form even if the incident is not yet closed (hm, they maybe reached their goal by spamming my inbox?).. The feedback form was much worse than the experience with the system itself. Which is another issue here I think. Like there is a system you are absolutely satisfied with and easy to use. And then you get a feedback form to fill in about the well usable system. But its feedback form makes you annoyed and quite nervous as silly questions are put together in weird structure. I filled it in though. Feedback is feedback I take it seriously 😊


Again, one or two days later I got a call. It was a person from the insurance company. I suspect that she must've been a BA or some kind of product person of the online system that I used for logging the incident. But she didn't mention her role in the phone. She didn't ask me whether it is a right time for me to talk or she didn't state a clear goal of the call at the beginning. My first thought was that she should have been more polite. She mentioned they got my feedbacks, and "Is there anything else you might want to highlight?" - she asked. There was nothing specific really, so I said "No, there is nothing I could think of at the moment". But then she started to ask things like "do you have ideas where we should put new fields and what those fields should be?" And whether I missed any fields during my journey in the system. I asked back what she meant exactly on this but she just repeated herself; whether they should put a new field in there. When I asked where exactly she replied "any page in the system".

Wow. So we should stop here for a minute. WHAT KIND OF QUESTIONS ARE THESE??? 
I just hope that she checked my current role before she called and she probably saw I have been PO-ing a long while and that's why she thought she can ask me questions like the above ones. Otherwise I would be very sad if her approach is like this with everyone.


I am not saying that we product persons who sticked with development teams shouldn't reach out to clients. We definitely should, as much as we can. But first we need to think of a few things:
  1. Learn to ask the right questions from the right audience. No one wants to get these kind of questions I wrote above. And companies might not want their employees to ask these questions from any clients.
  2. Learn about user research - there are great articles, readings on this topic even if you are not a UX person you can learn the minimum from these that is necessary in situations like above.
  3. Consult with a person who is more experienced than you. Maybe you just need to do this one or two times and you are ready to go and call the clients.
  4. Step into the client's shoes a bit and imagine you get the same call you are about to make. How would you feel/react? If you imagine the conversation in advance, you would be surprised how much it can help. 
  5. Be kind - don't forget you are the one who asks for help!
And always think about the below: 


Címkék:

Megjegyzések

Megjegyzés küldése

Népszerű bejegyzések ezen a blogon

The 12 meter: where sailboats and EventStorm Walls meet

If I say  12 meter   what do people associate it with? They imagine it as a distance, but it is also a rating class for racing sailboats that are designed to the international rule. But since last week I also know that it can be a space where a mid-sized company's let's say "normally healthy business' story" can fit in 😉   Well, yes I finally managed to attend an EventStorming workshop. But this workshop wasn't just any  EventStorming workshop. This was  The  EventStorming Workshop This was a Master Class for  EventStorming enthusiasts directly from the Master, the Inventor: Alberto Brandolini .  Even better this was the first  EventStorming Master Class in Italy that was held in English. Yeah actually otherwise it wouldn't have been too useful for me to attend,right?  And it is not just Alberto (sorry, Alberto) who makes the training awesome, but Enrico who  always tries his best to arrange everything that participants need or might n
Megjegyzés küldése
További információk

A real life example why it is better to focus on the problem first

Let me share an experience from real life where I realized why it is important to focus on the problem and not the solution.. We bought a house recently, but this story is from the time right before we bought it. Probably most of you've already gone through the process of applying to a bank loan in your lives. There is a point at which bank comes and check your house and estimate its value. The amount you can get from the bank depends on this estimated value.  But let me just start at the beginning… We were in a DIY shop looking around for the latest things our builder had asked us to buy. Anyways. Steve told me that we also needed to buy a house number. I was like ok let's look at the house numbers in the proper aisle of the store.  We went there and after a while we managed to pick the numbers and we realized we needed a slash sign as well. So, only three numbers and a slash; however as you probably know you can never find more than three things that match
2 megjegyzés
További információk

How a relaxing coffee turned into strategic modeling...

We had one simple idea: to enjoy a relaxing coffee in our garden. I didn’t expect that I would need to use all of my Domain-Driven Design skills! We have been living in our house for half a year now, and a couple of weeks ago, when the weather was perfect, we had a "crazy" idea: why not sit outside and have our coffee in the terrace? Sounds reasonable, right? Little did we realize the implementation was a bit more complex than it sounded. Because in order to sit there and enjoy the sunshine (with the coffee of course), we realized we needed to take all the stuff away from the terrace to have enough space there for the garden furniture.  Oh, wait! We had no proper furniture that time. And we also had no idea where to put the stuff from the terrace.  So first thing in the priority order was to buy a storage shed. Then it needed to be assembled. Then if that was done, we needed to pack everything that we wanted into the shed to free up space on the
Megjegyzés küldése
További információk