Why Design Thinking is Beneficial to Product Marketing Managers
WRITTEN BY Lyle Burns, Fluvio Consultant
What is design thinking and how does it align with Product Marketing?
Design thinking is defined as “a mindset and approach to problem solving and innovation anchored around human-centered design.” The key to design thinking is empathy and keeping users – not just the problem – at the center of the solution. Often when working with product teams I’ve noticed that products and features get built without deep understanding of the customer and their problem. It may solve their problem, but the customer often has to adapt.
After the product is built we often take a puzzle approach of finding a way to properly fit this product into the market. Then, we continue to take the approach of talking about what problem we solved for the customer. This usually centered around productivity, reducing costs, or other benefits more detached from the actual user, even as businesses claim to be more and more “customer-centric”. So, while originally the concept of design thinking was for product teams and designers to leverage, it is a framework that can be applied across an organization and can be especially valuable for your product marketing team to leverage.
The skills for design thinking and product marketing overlap
As a marketer my philosophy is to think of how the product or service that I’m marketing fits into a customer’s life. This is what initially drew me to design thinking, the overlapping human-centric focus.
As a product marketer my role is to work across product, marketing, sales, and customer success with the goal of serving as the voice of the customer. To do this effectively I need to have a strong understanding of the market and our position in it along with awareness of customer sentiment. The outputs of this often include building ideal customer profiles, customer personas and journeys, messaging and positioning that resonates with customers, GTM planning and strategies, sales narratives and more.
To be able to create all of these resources, the soft skills to listen, observe, connect and deeply understand a customer and address their problems are critical. To be truly effective those soft skills must be paired with hard skills such as collecting and analyzing data and storytelling. These skills are deeply aligned with design thinking making the synergy between the two disciplines extremely clear.
Principles to leverage
The overarching philosophy of putting customer experiences first aligns across design thinking and product marketing. But, there are specific principles and skills taught in design thinking that can be leveraged by product marketers to be more effective in their roles.
Source: Somersault Innovation
Framing the question / challenge:
The design thinking process begins with framing a challenge or question in order to define your target audience, clarify your goal, and articulate the current state of the problem. In the Insights For Innovation course, IDEO recommends using a “How Might We” statement to frame the challenge. The goal is to avoid making the challenge too broad that there’s too many possible solutions, but also not so narrow that you’re directed towards one specific solution. For example, if addressing a problem with pricing transparency, framing the question to explore the entire product experience is probably too broad and framing the question to only focus on the pricing on the checkout page may be too narrow. Keeping your options for solutions focused but open generates more possibilities. Keeping the user at the center of the experience that’s being explored helps align potential solutions with the impact on their experience.
In my experience framing the problem and audience has been the first step to executing better interviews and research while also driving alignment with product and sales teams that will also benefit from the outcomes.
Listening, observation and interviewing:
As I mentioned earlier, product marketing should be serving as the voice of the customer within an organization. To do this effectively, PMMs must be speaking with customers on a regular cadence and ideally potentially even interacting with them in person. Making the most of this time with customers requires skills in observation, listening, and interviewing to uncover the best insights.
By having a mindset of curiosity and deepening understanding, design thinking tells us we can begin understanding what our audience values and cares about. When observing we’re looking for what prompts behavior, how people adapt and may use your product to accomplish their goals that differs from their intended usage. We’re also looking for patterns, what users care about, body language changes when using or discussing your product, and just keep a lookout for anything unexpected. It can be hard as an observer to say a user should or could just do this, but removing that bias or judgment allows for greater understanding.
When talking to customers and not just observing their usage, the goal is to get deeper and more honest answers that give true insight, not just collect responses. Asking the right questions is just one aspect of the interview. Building rapport early with positive body language, allowing interviewees to feel comfortable, knowledgeable, and that they are having more of a conversation goes a long way. Listening for what questions captures their interests and attention and digging deeper on those can help uncover valuable insights. Often overlooked is what is not being verbalized or incongruences in answers that can provide real insights.
Source: IDEO Insight for Innovation Course Toolkit
Empathy:
At the core of design thinking is empathy, and in my opinion, this should also be at the heart of your work as a PMM. To truly understand the emotional triggers that motivate buyers and users of your products and services is essential to building personas and buyer journeys, creating messaging that resonates, and driving product adoption and usage. While obviously design thinking is focusing on how to utilize empathy to design a better product or experience for users, the tools it teaches can and should be leveraged by PMMs as well.
The Insight for Innovation course recommends creating an “immersive empathy experience” by changing your perspective, limiting yourself to understand what parts of an experience you may take for granted, try a workflow or process yourself, and engage in an analogous experience. Documenting the feelings, difficulties, key learnings, validate those feelings in your research and interviews, then incorporate them into your product marketing strategies and outputs.
Assessing and sharing insights:
All of this information you’re collecting from customers is great, but it’s meaningless if it’s not actionable. In addition, it can be difficult to assess qualitative data to find what is most useful as different insights may stand out to different stakeholders depending on their needs or perspectives.
Turning this data into actionable insights takes practice, but a strong process makes it easier. First, capture your individual data points whether they’re quotes, observations, or learnings from your empathy immersion. Start connecting those data points together by looking for themes and patterns. Tools like affinity maps or determining keywords can help streamline this process.
Once you have the themes, patterns, top quotes, stories, feelings, and other data organized, craft the insights in a way that is consumable for others. The course defines the qualities of a good insight as being informative, inspiring, and memorable. An insight should not be obvious and give a glimpse into how people think or feel to get to the “why”. This will prepare you to craft a strong story based on your research.
Storytelling:
As every marketer knows, a good story is critical for communicating information, connecting with the audience, and helping information stay top of mind. Know the audience for your story. Are you presenting to the product team, other members of the marketing team, sales, or leadership? This determines which insights become the focus as you tailor your message and story to your audience, just like you tailor your messaging to align with each customer persona.
When I have been presenting research from customer interviews and market research, I lay out the key themes and takeaways. Then I include quotes to add specificity to the summary of the information and details. Specificity and details make the information descriptive and memorable, while adding credibility. Focus on editing down. While there are always more interesting things to include, cut information, themes, or patterns that can distract from the flow of your story. Finally getting that flow right so your themes and points connect together helps your audience make connections and remember your points. If the information doesn’t stick and influence the action, then it doesn’t help your customers or the organization.
Final thoughts
Product marketers often fall into the trap of focusing on the “what”. What problem our product or service is solving for you and what benefits the product provides is important. Equally important is how a problem is being solved, how a product or service will fit into their daily lives, how it will change their workflows, how much will they have to adapt all need to be understood, and furthermore why do they need this solution.
The principles of design thinking can help product marketers uncover insights of “why” and “how” that will strengthen customer profiles, personas, messaging and positioning. These insights make PMMs even more valuable partners across the organization as the improved understanding of customers and more human and user-centric approach can provide greater positive impact to marketing, product, and sales teams.