A cutting-edge product doesn’t just appear overnight. It requires hours of user testing, interviews and ample research in order for teams to uncover the needs of their customer base and ultimately deliver the greatest possible product to the market.
These are all things Jon Dobrowolski knows well. As VP of product at luxury fashion marketplace Grailed, Dobrowolski leads the company’s efforts to refine its e-commerce platform. He and his teammates spend most of their time gathering customer feedback and tackling complex problems in an effort to optimize the consumer experience.
While Dobrowolski’s team uses different strategies to measure customer behavior, there’s one tactic that has proven to be especially impactful: communication with customers. For example, when confronted with a particular product issue, the team decided to co-develop solutions with a cohort of their customers. According to Dobrowolski, this coordinated problem-solving effort served as a testament to the strength of direct communication.
“This instance proved the power of having a consistent conversation with customers in order to illuminate what we see in surveys, support tickets and business insights,” Dobrowolski said.
Whether they’re performing targeted research or working alongside consumers to find solutions, Dobrowolski and his teammates’ actions are defined by one thing: putting the customer first. Built In NYC caught up with Dobrowolski to learn how his team gauges user behavior to enhance their products.
What tools do you use to get customer feedback? Are there ways to drill down and better understand what users are looking for when working on a particularly difficult design or product issue?
My team and I have a lot of fun solving complex problems. We use several tools to collect and analyze the what and the why of our customers’ behavior. Our current focus is on helping teams select the best method, tool or activity to use based on the insights we collect.
If we have a problem we’re trying to solve with targeted research, we focus on exposing our assumptions and hypotheses earlier in order to optimize our time. Nothing beats a user test with probing interview questions. It’s a classic method for a reason.
How do you put yourself in the mindset of a user, given all the extra knowledge you have about your product?
Most employees use our product regularly to achieve the same goals as our buyers, sellers and moderators. While the signal we get from firsthand use is invaluable at a high level, these anecdotal experiences are valued for what they are: a data point.
At Grailed, we treat everything we do as a product. That means we conduct research to gain an empathetic perspective in order to move quickly with the confidence that we’re making the best decision. By exercising this muscle internally, it’s natural that we do the same when making choices that impact our customers. It’s important to speak to our customers and observe their processes as they make transactions on the platform. To make choices informed by our customer contact, we encode what we’ve learned into principles to drive each project.
To make choices informed by our customer contact, we encode what we’ve learned into principles to drive each project.”
How do you distinguish between what users want and need when there’s a conflict between the product output and the overall goals of your company?
I work at Grailed because our peer-to-peer marketplace model tightly aligns with the incentives of the company and our customers. When buyers and sellers win, our company wins. If we’re ever misaligned, we always end up back at the principles we’ve agreed on to help us make the best decisions for the marketplace.
