empathy – Hemang Shah | Innovation | Strategy

One of my favorite brainstorming teams would meet on Monday at lunch. We would get together every two weeks. The meeting always started with the same question.

What bothered you over the weekend that you want to solve today?

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All the participants would proceed to share the pain point(s) they experienced. It might have been something they saw at a mall or a movie theatre or while out on walk. They may have noted a stronger “What if” thought. Or wondered “Hmm, why aren’t they doing X this way?”

The key is to gather these problems in a no filter approach.

It was simply a problem statement collection exercise. There’s no revenue analysis, market surveys were not required. No slides, for that matter.

Collect as many pain points as possible.

The moderator of the meeting would go around the room, jotting down these on simple spreadsheet. No one else could use devices. No screen sharing. It’s just a polling exercise around the room. After about 15 minutes, we would then pause before proceeding to the next stage.

Selecting the problem to solve.

This was selecting the strongest pain that wasn’t solved. In other words, the best opportunity to go after as a team. Usually, the group would quickly determine that. If there was a deadlock, the moderator would call rank and select the problem for the group.

After that, we would brainstorm different approaches to solve the issue at hand.

Depending on the problem, we would devote anywhere from 15 – 20 minutes to sometimes a full hour. The moderator aims to keep the group energy high peppering with questions if the team is stuck. We are trying to keep the ball rolling. When things get to a standstill i.e. when all creative juices have stopped, we move to the next problem. Along the while, the moderator would note the key ideas generated that will help the product.

What makes Mondays so special?

We are outside of our work on weekends and get a natural pause among our chores, meeting people, and relaxing. Subconsciously, we can get to a state of pause and wonder. Issues identified in this state are worth spending a bit of time. Before we get too involved with the other work items, filing them is worth addressing.

But we only selected one or two to solve. What about the rest of the pain points?

That is your pain point bank. If a problem wasn’t picked during one meeting, we can bring it up during the next. We also don’t forget things that bother us. Quite often, the team will remind of something worth spending time on. Else, you have the moderator for that too.

Is that it?

Yes, keep it simple. The most important thing is to instill this as a habit. Our meetings were recurring and at lunch, which people should not skip 🙂

Try it and you will look forward to these meetings.

Happy Ideating!

Hemang.

I have a long-held dislike with surveys asking to rate on a scale of 1 – 10 with anything less than 8 being the worst. There is an optional comment field, which I suspect gets filled with 1-word praises or lengthy rants. Such data is pointless (largely) to determine what to improve.

If things were either awesome or terrible, you would know by just looking.

A restaurant doing great business will have customers lining up left, right, and center. A restaurant screwing up orders will have customers shouting left, right, and center. Data collection did zilch to know this.

What you need are qualitative insights from your users or potential customers.

Your job is to know their issues and what is meaningful to them. Why is it an issue? What will fixing it help them. You need to dive beyond the superficial answer. Surveys and interviews are terrible to get these insights. So, what should we do?

Have conversations.

Back when I was planning my grad studies in the US, I followed a playbook prescribed by seniors. It was a simple process – select universities based on rankings, budget, and your scores. Get this to 8 – 10 universities with the hope of being admitted to 3 – 4. To get to the final 10 that would be blessed by my application, I turned to their websites.

A good website meant a good university. Especially, the ones with sparse pages of faculty members went lower in my list. This was a quantitative exercise. I came up with a solid plan to be presented to my parents until I bumped into Chintan, my senior visiting after a year in the US. I was ecstatic on seeing him!

Not because he was a good friend – I barely knew him. However, I planned to apply to his university, which was in my list. It was a good school, great website, good faculty, fit my budget, and I was confident of getting in there.

Chintan was at one of the hangout places in our college. I sat with him and asked him how it was going. Over the next 30 mins or so, he shared how difficult it was for him. Studies aside, his experience was not favorable. He gave me numerous details that would have never been found on the website – the class strength, the lack of on-campus jobs, lack of research opportunities etc. I realized how big and costly my blind spots would be.

The start point of receiving these insights was a conversation.

A simple “Hi, How are you doing?” Not a survey form. Not 20 questions to be rated on a scale of 1 – 5. Just, a regular conversation between friends.

Going by what he shared, I sought similar conversations with students who were at other universities on my list. I then formed a modified list and from that chose Drexel for my MS and PhD in Engineering.

To hear another perspective, you need to watch this conversation between Jaimit Doshi and Adhar Masand. I stumbled upon this podcast recently and am in awe of how well Jaimit explains the customer discovery process.

In our world that encourages moving fast, conversations are an underrated goldmine.

As Jaimit says, only consider insights from 45-min or longer conversations. Anything less, it may have transactional data, i.e. data with lower insights.

Aim to have conversations where you let the other person open up. It isn’t so much about the place. It’s about how you make the other person comfortable.

That’s when we share what’s meaningful to us with context.

Having said that, how would you rate this newsletter on a scale of 1 – 10? 😉

Happy Ideating!

Hemang.