Musings about user research, user experience and product ownership.

Please get in touch by emailing: ange@thisprod.com

Unbiased User Research is your friend when you are serious about Growth. 

I help businesses build the right products for the right people in the right marketplace.

Build what users want and know where to find the users who want what your building.

This is what I do. I listen to your questions and get you answers, fast! 

Not only is it important to test that a product works, it's equally important to validate the market landscape, and consumer demand with real users.

We can't build everything; we can build one thing. I can help you make sure it's the right thing.

I can help you find out what users are most drawn to in your product, which questions they have, where they're looking & why they're looking.

I'll provide you with videos showing you how users use your product, in context of their daily lives. 

I can organise and conduct usability testing at a fraction of the cost and time of traditional agencies.

"Ange combined imagination and creativity with good commercial sense. She played a big part in changes to our pricing model which resulted in a marked increase in profitability. She single handedly put in place a customer survey which helped solidify a clear understanding of what parents find most essential about Screen Time. She was also a driving force in getting the Screen Time app onto the Apple App Store. I'd highly recommend Ange to any team wanting to get a handle on their marketing and usability."

"Ange played a vital role in shaping our product direction during the early stages of MoneyHub’s development.

She helped develop our personas and identified a core need that had a broad appeal across multiple conflicting personas which is still at the heart of our product strategy today. It was a delight to work with her, and I would be delighted to work with her again in the future.".

We use products for no more than one or two reasons. Think about your toothbrush, your phone, even your breakfast this morning or lack thereof. If you were asked what factors influenced those purchasing or non-purchasing decisions, you’d likely mention only one or two reasons. 

People are busy. They don’t have time to compare 20 product features across multiple competing products. But they can prioritise what matters most to them. And they do. And perhaps they aren’t choosing your product. Your Product Owner can help you fix this. 

Product Owners define and build what matters most:

A Scrum Product Owner literally owns the entirety of the product life cycle in order to create the most value for users and your business. It’s their job to find out what is most important to your users when looking for a product to solve a problem. The ONE THING that matters to users isn’t always obvious. 

Working with user research, user behaviour data and gathering insights from other stakeholders, your product owner will be able to identify the ONE THING, and use that insight to get your Product Backlog in shape to deliver it. 

Be the ONE THING even if it is part of a wider workflow:

Your users might need your product to slot into their current workflow - as they might have other tools they know, or their task may be too complex for you to solve in isolation. For example, let’s say you animate text brilliantly. A videographer might use you for their music video to add the lyrics in. That one thing, is to animate text brilliantly. 

Let your product owner prioritise user stories to ensure you do that ONE THING better, whether that’s faster, cheaper, more creatively or more visually appealing than they would have done with your competitors. Even if users have to plug you into their existing workflow, the benefit you would provide would outweigh the inconvenience. If your product is worth it. 

It’s easier to make what users need, than it is to convince users they need what you’ve made.		

Here’s where a good user researcher is the product owners side kick. We need to consider, not what users say they prioritise when choosing a product, but why they actually chose products in the past. 


A few examples spring to mind:
Starbucks - It is well reported that Starbucks does not serve the best coffee. However, people choose Starbucks because of the experience of ordering their coffee and the vibe created with the decor. Starbucks served differently, without the seating and decor, would fall flat. With the same coffee. 

Empower your Product Owner to Own the Product:

If a product owner is only responsible for the platform, or one feature, one component, or the product requirement details, how can you be sure that your product will deliver that ONE THING cohesively and do it well? Some companies employ different product owners to work under one senior product owner - but this still allows one product owner to pull it all together. You can end up with a bloated product that does many things, some well, some not, but not ONE THING brilliantly. 

It’s a bit like giving a very talented designer the ability to choose only the shirt in an outfit. Just like an entire outfit needs to look good, your product needs to speak to users as a whole. Does it deliver value where they need it most? The person to bring all the different elements together is your Product Owner. 

You might think this is too much responsibility for one person. Let the metrics speak and guide whether the product is on course. Which metrics - these metrics! When trying something new with a product, no single person has all the answers. However, a good product owner won’t work in isolation but will take insights in from stakeholders, users and your data. 

Let’s look at Google Chrome. By far the most popular browser with around 64% of search taking place on its platform according to StatCounter. 

The usage stats show that privacy isn’t yet the top priority for the majority of users as their privacy-centered rivals lag behind. As it stands, Chrome is believed to be one of one of the fastest browsers, and it most certainly was years ago when users opted for Chrome as it regularly outpaced Firefox. Even though the two browsers are now neck and neck, Chrome and I would go a step further. Were Chrome to become a slow browser tomorrow, people would abandon it in droves regardless of all their connected Google accounts, and despite Google being synonymous with search. 

Finding the ONE THING can be ridiculously difficult. But we don’t really have a choice but to do the user research, pull all the data together so we can find that most important differentiator. It might not be unique to your product either, which is why I’m not calling it your USP. Fast search is not unique to Chrome but they better be faster than the rest. Not knowing why people use your product instead of your competitor, or why users prefer your competitors is costly. Not just in terms of lost business, but in lost time and lost motivation, as different features are prioritised, built, released, not used and technical debt piles up. 

Here is where your product owner comes in. This person doesn’t just help keep your teams productive by building the next thing, it is their job to find the ONE THING your product needs to offer users and then to guard it in the backlog prioritisation. Despite higher ups later steering the product elsewhere if something happens in the industry. 

What about being agile? Shouldn’t we be quick to change course. If your product direction is based on solid qualitative and quantitative user research, that ONE THING should still be relevant in three months, six months, one year. The job the user has hired your product for, should still be the main reason they use your product. If that job becomes obsolete, then this fundamental shift will no doubt require a major pivot - however these scenarios are rare. 

If you're Chrome, people hire your product to get answers, and as long as you’re fast and accurate, they will continue to hire you. How you deliver it, the technology you use to build it, how it looks, how it works - all of that can change as you test your output. But the direction is still the same. 


How do you distill all the potential product differentiators and find the ONE THING that your customers value most about your product? This is core to the role of your Product Owner. Structuring the Product Backlog in such a way as to ensure what is most important and what is complementary to that, is prioritised and built first. 

Many Product Owners struggle with this because they don’t have the much-needed backing of their executives to fulfill their role to the full. Instead the Product Owner role can be diluted to simply shuffling JIRA tickets in order to keep product teams sufficiently busy. And here our metrics come to the rescue as they show us whether we’re on the right track. Metrics such as Monthly Active Users, Churn Rate and Intercom’s brilliant take on NPS, “How disappointed would you be if …”

Building the most important thing why you need to trust that they’ll do the job and do so much more than manage the backlog. They need to regularly meet with stakeholders to gather their product insights, they need to regularly connect with user research findings and be asking new questions in order to distinguish between hypothesis and verified data. 

And so much time and money is often spent on extensive features lists that users might not even mention if asked about a product. Don't let that happen to your product.

Why you should

Has agile just become a meaningless word that we should all just drop? It used to mean something (I think) - but no more.

The original agile manifesto, while a bit simplistic, gets at the heart of what agile was supposed to be about:

We are uncovering better ways of developing
software by doing it and helping others do it.
Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on
the right, we value the items on the left more.

It was a reaction to the fact that formal specification-driven development simply wasn't enabling teams to create software that best solved user needs. It wasn't created as a set of rules, more as a set of principles.

Unfortunately across our industry it has often been reduced to a set of rules - especially with Scrum and all its ceremonies. 

I suggest that we drop using the word agile and rather talk about the principles directly. With my background as a user-researcher, I think that user-centred design is one of the best principles. 

If we keep the user at the centre (the end-user, the developer, etc.) that can help keep us on the right track.

Have consultants destroyed the meaning of agile

Understand your users or your competitors will. And they will build a product that better meets their goals. This is too important simply to treat as an annual team-building activity. 

Relationships require effort. Genuine effort. Understanding requires genuine interest. I've seen too many teams with stagnant User Persona's stuck on walls - getting an occasional mention as an after thought. Your users change just like you do. Technology evolves, their needs evolve. You need to keep users close to your business in order to spot these changes and opportunities early on. 

We've all discarded note-taking applications over the years in favour of an app that worked better and often this choice had little to do with the ability of the app to store text in a document. The list of reasons why certain note-taking applications win the feature war is a post in of itself - but let's just say, Notion, Evernote, Google Docs, OneNote, Google Keep, Apple Notes, Bear, etc all have users who choose them for specific reasons. Notion, a (fairly) new-entrant has carved a section of an already crowded market because they offer something different for a subset of note-taking users. They offer a powerful collaborative database so knowledge can easily be shared between people and flexibility! Users can nest content within content, create templates of anything including multi-page layered content, and embed text/video with handy previews. Not all users need this. But to those who do, Notion is a breath of fresh air. Imagine though if Notion were to lose sight of their users and how their technology operates in the real world? They would soon find themselves building features that users don't need, or can't use as intended.  

Plus, Notion started off as a no-code tool that people back in 2015 didn't seem to need, despite the boom in no-code tech. Ivan and Simon nearly ran out of funds and had to start again from ground zero. And yours truly is a beneficiary of their pivot to the Notion we know today!

“We focused too much on what we wanted to bring to the world,” Ivan put it. “We needed to pay attention to what the world wanted from us.” Ivan Zhao, co-founder Notion.


Focusing on user needs, isn't just an annual sticky note fest at Notion.  Nor does gathering user feedback need to be expensive and time consuming. Using emails for starters is sufficient, and logging all the feedback qualitatively in order to steer product direction is a good start. 

Questions to keep in mind: 

How are users actually using our product? You might find that users see value that you might not recognised. 

In what context are users using our product? Where are they? On which devices? Is there a reason why your product meets a need in a specific context? How can your product improve for the user, based on this contextual insight?

What are your users complaining about the most? This might give an indication as to what they actually care about because let's face it, complaining is annoying in of itself. Users' complaining is a good sign. It shows they care about something. 

What are users asking for and why? This can give you an idea of what users actually want to use your product for, and where you fill a gap in the market. 



Not really caring about users' gets us in the end

User Analysis - not just a team building exercise 

From the blog