484: Making customer research easier – with Prashant Mahajan

Tools for making voice-of-the-customer insights more accessible to product managers

Today we are talking about aspects of the Market Research knowledge area for product mastery. Specifically, we are discussing how to overcome challenges collecting actionable customer insights.

Helping us with this is Prashant Mahajan, the founder of  Zeda.io. Prashant is an experienced product manager and leader, having guided product development in several organizations.

In these experiences, he identified a critical gap: Many Product Managers are unsure if they are building the right products because they can’t access customer feedback, customer insight, or sentiment. This led him to developing Zeda.io, which is also focused on the importance of publicly sharing product roadmaps and progress with customers.

Summary of some concepts discussed for product managers [2:52] You founded Zeda.io to help product managers capture the voice of the customer and get actionable customer insights. What challenges did you encounter as a product manager that gave you experience for improving how to gain customer insights?

We learn about product management best practices, like solving customer problems and making a strategy, but most of the product management I saw in companies was about operations. Updating an Excel sheet or going to a meeting was taking up too much of my mental bandwidth. I thought there could be a better way to do product management, where operations are taken care of by software. We took inspiration from GitHub AI Copilot and Chat GPT. We started with the vision to make product management simpler and smarter.

Product management can be divided into product discovery, prioritization, building, and launch. Most product people are good at building things, but they don’t know what problem to solve. If people knew what to build, we would not see companies launch useless products and fail.

I experienced these challenges firsthand in my previous company. You get input from sales, support, customer-facing teams, and user research. As the company becomes bigger and bigger, the distance between the product team and the user keeps increasing. Meeting with people is like playing Telephone, and by the time you get information, it might be four or five people away from the customer. You can’t go to one place and find out what your customers are asking. I wanted to make a platform where you can centralize the customer voice, analyze it, generate insights, and make the key takeaways actionable.

The product team, including designers and engineers, needs to know why they are building things. If you tell them the problem and the impact of solving it, they can brainstorm together and ship it out. It’s critical that you’re using your resources for the right problem, which will create impact, and not just randomly building things.

[10:24] After you built a product to solve your problem, how did you validate the pain points and core problems for the larger product management community?

I am a strong proponent of talking to people. In the last three and a half years, I have had a call with a product leader on average every day. I’ve talked to CPOs, VPs, and people who have just started as the first PM at a startup.

The core problem as a product leader is there are so many ideas and a lack of confidence on deciding which idea to pursue. You need to justify the ROI of building a product.

One CPO said he needed our product to be insurance for his job. If the product didn’t work, he would be fired. He needed the data to save his job.

[14:18] How does your product at Zeda.io help product managers?

We focus on product discovery and planning. We centralize all your customer voice or input from customers and customer-facing teams in one place so you don’t have to juggle meetings and Excel sheets and you don’t lose any information.

We use AI to analyze customer input and show its impacts: What are your top customers asking? What are you current customers asking? What are your potential customers asking? What are the biggest pain points, opportunities, feature requests, etc?

You can adjust the prioritization framework to prioritize based on revenue, number of requests, particular product, etc. You can convert an action into a Jira ticket. When you ship the product, we’ll help you publish release notes and updates, which help with adoption and NPS and reduces churn.

[16:54] How is the problem of transparency with information addressed in organizations now and by your platform?

If you don’t have a tool like Zeda, you will have separate tools to keep track of information from sales, customer support, user research, product, etc. The tools and processes would be different, and the information would be scattered. Getting access to information from different sources and converting it to a presentable form will take weeks.

We have built native integration into all the different tools. The information is centralized in real time. This cuts down weeks of collecting information to days.

[21:19] How can AI be leveraged to help product managers?

One way is taking care of operations. I can write SQL queries or I can ask the AI to do that work. Building a product is an art and a science. The craft of building a beautiful product requires a lot of focused attention. If the AI takes care of operational speed, you can do more strategic, creative work.

The second use of AI is researching your product. Once you have identified what to build and spent time doing strategic, creative work, brainstorming with AI before a meeting will help a lot.

For example, if you’re building a product for older people, you could ship it to a 70-year-old person and find out you need to make the font size bigger. Then you go back to your development team and tell them to make the font size bigger. Instead, you could ask AI to tell you about research that has already been done that shows that conversion rate increases with font size.

Action Guide: Put the information Prashant shared into action now. Click here to download the Action Guide. Useful links:

• Learn more about Zeda.io
• Connect with Prashant on LinkedIn

Innovation Quote

“Fool did not know it was impossible, so he did it.” – unknown

Thanks!

Thank you for taking the journey to product mastery and learning with me from the successes and failures of product innovators, managers, and developers. If you enjoyed the discussion, help out a fellow product manager by sharing it using the social media buttons you see below.