5 Essential Meetings that Product Managers need to have regularly — (5) User Meetings

A Product Manager works by Collaborating, Information Gathering, Influencing, Strategising. To do this, they have to regularly meet and discuss with multiple stakeholders in the company. For this reason, meetings are an essential part of a PM’s job. In this blog, we will discuss the absolutely important meetings that Product Managers need to have regularly to keep their work in order. We will also cover:

1. Why these meetings are important?
2. Who should be part of these meetings?
3. Who should be leading them?
4. What could be their frequency?
5. How to Ace these meetings?

Meeting 5 — User Meetings

Users are at the center of anything and everything you do to your products. If you are building a new feature, removing/changing any existing feature, adding a new product, everything revolves around user needs and solving for them. Therefore it is essential that you meet up with your users regularly. This will keep you updated about your users evolving needs, problems and also help you to test out new prototypes, features, products, etc

Why this meeting is important?

Strategizing and scheduling regular user meetings will keep you providing important user insights. Knowing the user like knowing yourself is something that your job demands and also everyone in the company will expect you to know. So get to know your users better through these meetings, know their needs, problems, lifestyle. This can also help you to discover new opportunities for your company

Discover existing pain points for your product and keep iterating in the right direction. If you are the first one to know your user's pain points and you start proactively working on them, that means you are steps ahead of other people coming to you and telling you about your user's problems, especially business teams. Stay top of your game by knowing things and acting upon them faster before the alarm goes off!

Make usability testings a habit. Yes, you can test out new prototypes, features, products using quantitative tools as well, but that will only tell you what is working and not working. Quantitative data won’t tell you why it is not working, and without knowing that you won’t know what changes to make and why to make them. That’s why it is important to do usability testings so that you can know the why’s behind your product decisions

Who should be part of this meeting?

This will vary as per the purpose of the user meeting.

Client/Customers Interviews

You can include your UX Research team member for these interviews as well Make sure you don’t crowd these meetings, which can be intimidating for the user as well. Keep a limit of two people including you from your side for the interview

If you a PM for a B2B product, i.e. if your product caters to organizations/business entities, then you will need to meet up with your client POCs regularly

You can arrange for in-person meetings, where you can understand their evolving needs and problems, and a lot of other details from their company goals, to anything new they are focussing on, which direction they are moving, what other products they use, etc

The basic idea is that you get know your customers — their goals, problems, needs, and use this to find new opportunities for your product

Testing New Prototypes/Features/Product

You should include the designers, UX researchers for this project in the usability testing sessions. Do not bring in more than 2 people from your side into the testing room. Enable others to sit outside the testing room and observe the testing if possible. If there is no provision for this, you can share recordings of the user testing with them later

Testing Existing Product/ Features/User Flows

You can include a larger team here to view the usability testings. This will help them empathize better with the users and their problems. If you are able to set up a room for the team to view the usability testings live, then it's great. Otherwise, you can always share the recordings with them later. Your larger team can include business team members, other PMs, designers, UX researchers, tech team members

What could be the frequency of this meeting?

To schedule them better you can keep these meetings during the last week of every month. By month-end, you would have some new feature/prototype/flow that you would need testing, and if there is nothing new then you can test out existing user flows in your product for uncovering more user problems

Keeping these meetings in the last week of the month will ensure that you have product feedback ready for the coming month, which will help you to manage your product backlog and sprints even better

How to Ace this meeting?

1. Start planning for this meeting early, since you will need to invite the users, block their calendar, and arrange facilities for the meetings as well. A good time to start would be the third week of the month
2. Don’t plan to uncover all the user problems or usability problems in one session. It is impractical and will put a lot of stress on you and the participating users as well. If you discover few problems, you can start working on them now, and then again in the next meeting you can uncover some more issues. Research and development is a continuous and iterative process, and you should also sync yourself with this process
3. Use screen recording software, audio and video recorders for recording the interview and testing sessions. Make sure you are comfortable and handy with these software's. Do a couple of trial testings with your colleagues in advance to make sure everything works and is in order
4. Reward your users for their time and effort with a reasonable cash voucher or gift voucher. Make sure you communicate this to your users when you are asking them to participate in the interviews/testing sessions so that they will show interest to participate

Read about the other 4 Essential Meetings that Product Managers need to have regularly

Daily Standup — https://productpeas.medium.com/5-essential-meetings-that-product-managers-need-to-have-regularly-cecc0474b9e0

Team Sync-up — https://productpeas.medium.com/5-essential-meetings-that-product-managers-need-to-have-regularly-2-c4f563d52d7e

Business Stakeholders Catch-up — https://productpeas.medium.com/5-essential-meetings-that-product-managers-need-to-have-regularly-3-665293132af3

Retro Meetings — https://productpeas.medium.com/5-essential-meetings-that-product-managers-need-to-have-regularly-4-3570e9261387