Do you talk to your target audience a lot?
It's been suggested quite a lot to creators - talk to your customers, watch them use your product to understand the problem deeply.
As much as I agree with this notion, I've found that finding folks from the target audience to talk to takes a lot of time. There are a lot of things one needs to figure out in order for the interaction to be valuable like.
a. finding folks from the audience
b. reaching out to them - cold email, attending meetups
c. setting up the interaction - if you need to schedule a call to watch them use
d. having the interaction
How do you guys go about this? Do you also feel like this takes a lot of time to setup?
Big problem for product managers everywhere. But I would separate things in 2 different issues:
(1) Finding folks to talk to
(2) Scheduling interviews
(1) can be super easy or super hard. For instance, if I want to talk to existing customers about a new feature then all I need to do is to look at the folks that opted in for comms. It'd take me 5mins to get a list of emails to contact. BUT, at large companies it can also be a problem to get a list of folks that have not been talked to recently (to avoid spamming customers). When you have 100s of PMs, UXers trying to do research it can quickly overlap.
But if I want to talk to non-customers then it's a different story as I have to figured out where they hang and provide them an incentive to talk.
(2) is a bit more streamlined once you have a list of users. Meetingbird/Calendly can help with the scheduling and it syncs to Zoom to add the link to the event. Recording via Zoom is quite easy to do as well.
If it were quick and easy then everyone would be doing it. Your advantage becomes when you understand your audience better than everyone else. You'll understand better what they actually need. It's worth it in the long run.
I like building communities, so my previous business was built on the foundation of having a community that I interacted with on a daily basis.
Thanks for the response @rosiesherry. I certainly agree with all your reasons for why we should do this. My question was more about - what tips and tricks have ppl learnt to make it easier to get to interaction faster for both cases. Thanks to @spittet for spelling it out. i.e when you are just starting out, without any customers vs having customers who don't respond