Designing Products People Love by Hurff Scott

Author:Hurff, Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-06-15T18:25:12.226000+00:00

Find Product Ideas with Sales Safari

Going on a Sales Safari is the process of uncovering product ideas hiding in plain sight. It places the work of coming up with these ideas on your potential customers, and lays a foundation for repeatable success. Based on the observation techniques used by Lillian Gilbreth and Henry Dreyfuss, Sales Safari is what Amy Hoy — the method’s inventor — calls “net ethnography.”

“Sales Safari is ‘net ethnography,’ combined with some close reading and empathy,” Hoy says. “[It’s] step-by-step empathizing with your customer to understand them.”

In case you’ve forgotten, ethnography’s central premise is that you can learn what people actually do when they’re not aware that you’re looking. By observing what people do and say, you’ll understand how people behave on their terms and not on yours.

Why’s this important when creating products? Because this observation enlightens us about two really important things: the contexts in which customers might use a product, and how that affects the relative value of your product in their daily lives.[42]

“The key is you start by observing what [your customers] actually already do,” Hoy continues. “You don’t try to persuade a vegetarian to buy Omaha Steaks. You look at what they actually do in real life on the Internet. What they read. What they share with each other. The problems they discuss. What things that they ask help for. How they help others.”

What’s particularly unique about Sales Safari is that it takes place entirely online, for a number of reasons:

• Access. You can reach almost any unique community that exists on Earth without leaving your chair.

• Speed. Online research affords tons of conveniences like search engines, copy and paste, and more. Doing offline research is much harder to complete — and much harder to obtain without it being tainted by your presence.

• A reliable record. When people are speaking in “meatspace,” you either have to remember what they said, scribble notes, or awkwardly record your conversation. Online observation, though, is out there for you to read and parse at your leisure.

• Time to analyze. Online observation provides “the ability to disassociate what someone is saying from what you interpret them saying,” says 30x500 co-teacher Alex Hillman.

• Distance. You’re not physically present to influence anybody’s opinions, nor are you tempted to pull the research pitch — the act of pitching your product while asking people what they want. “People need to not know that you’re there watching,” Hillman continues. “That sounds really creepy to say it that way, but there’s a reason for it. This is professional lurking if you want to look at it that way. You’re there to watch what they do and say when they don’t know that you’re there.”

• Perspective. You literally have access to the entire Internet to find people in a particular audience. You’re not limited to a local Meetup or user group; instead, you can get the full picture of an audience’s pains from around the world.

Sales Safari’s intentional distance is designed to avoid the pitfalls of asking questions and influencing your subjects.

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