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In the last years working as a product designer in different B2B SaaS startups, I always encountered the following problems:
You record the interviews, write down the most important findings, and get a good feeling for the users' needs and problems. Unfortunately, this doesn't mean that other team members understand these findings. If you don't have a dedicated user researcher, it's too time-consuming to make the interview notes digestible enough that others would read them.
Your colleagues have ideas, the users have ideas, the POs have ideas, and designers have ideas. You end up with a ginormous backlog of features, that could solve a real problem, but not necessarily have to.
Feature ideas aren't worth much without a problem. You know about many problems your software or user has, but you don't have them quantified, so it's hard to know where to start and which feature to build first.
Airbnb's Lenny Rachitskys‘ article A Three-Step Framework For Solving Problems inspired me to try this approach:
Focussing only on the problems: No, not my personal problems like being scared of people who eat the brown parts of a banana. I got excited about becoming laser-focused on user problems. Problems only. Not features. Not values. Not gains. Not tasks. Not jobs. Not goals. Just problems.
"Nothing is more certain to cause a project to fail than a misunderstanding of the problem you are solving."
– Lenny Rachitsky, Growth PM at Airbnb
By making the process much more focused on problems and finding a new way to document and quantify each one that came up during user interviews, I was able to build this system that I would love to share with you as a template in this article. To get the most out of this article, you should review it first, click around a bit to get a feeling for it and continue reading afterwards.
It's in Airtable, but you can use Notion for it as well. There are some advantages compared to Notion that I will outline below.
The template is categorized into solutions, problems, sessions, people, and companies. I will start from the right to left and explain the process behind each one.
The tab "Companies" is really simple. It's just a list of your users' companies because you can interview multiple people from the same company.
You can segment your customer base and understand certain user behavior based on metrics like the MRR, company size, revenue, and more. Airtable gives you the possibility to integrate with Salesforce, so you can keep the data always up-to-date. And with a paid plan you directly have some really neat data visualization options.
You guessed it, here you find the people you interviewed or want to interview in the future. You can contact and keep track of potential interview candidates or automate this with services like usertesting.com, but they are often quite expensive.
If you noticed the "Persona" Column: You can segment the personas of the people you interview and connect each feature idea with the persona type. Cool insights might appear after a lot of interviews.
This tab consists of your past and scheduled sessions. During the interview, write down everything in the notes field of the session and focus mainly on the users' problems. After the interview, drag the session into "Extract problems".
When a session is in "Extract problems", copy all notes out of it and paste them into the problems tab. Remove all other findings and just leave the problems. Now map the session to each problem.
After some interviews, you will probably have dozens, maybe hundreds of problems in this tab. Many of them might be duplicates, but that's a good thing.
Give each problem a pain level rating from 1-10. You will probably have an immediate feeling of the right number because of a user's reaction while talking about it. Or estimate how much time you would save by solving the problem and then rate it.
As a last step in this tab, map a solution to each problem.
Here is where the magic happens: You have a list with all your feature ideas. The big difference is, that all these ideas are now connected to every problem you ever documented. You now know exactly which user from which company needs which feature and how painful it's for them.
It's all beautifully connected and the system gets richer and richer with more interviews you conduct.
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All features are now sorted by the problem intensity score. It's the summarized pain level from all problems this feature would solve.
To really make sure you are about to solve something real, fill out the "Real problem?" column. Often you have epics in your backlog, where you don't know much about the problems it would solve.
Another interesting thing you can do is to summarize the total MRR of the companies, so you see which features your most valuable customers need.
To separate the things you really plan to build in the near future from the fluff, the solutions are grouped into "Shortlist" and "Longlist". Normally there are 100+ ideas in here, and you only want to look at the important ones frequently.
From time to time, feature ideas from the Longlist will rise to the top and get a very high problem intensity score. Then it's probably time to have a deeper look at it and put it on the Shortlist.
If you expand one row, you will understand why. Underneath the feature name and description, you see every problem that this feature would solve from every user interview you conducted so far. This also helps a lot during feature specification.
In Airtable you can generate a form like this. When customer success or other colleagues bookmark this, they can directly add all customer problems they observe in the database.
I iterated and tested this template in two companies and countless interviews so far. The results were great and it saved so much time we usually wasted with documentation and presenting things. It made the interview findings a lot more transparent, connected and actionable.
I'm really curious to hear if you have a similar system in place and how you do it! Write me your feedback!
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