SaaS is Risky Business

Marty Cagan writes about the four main risks that every product organization has to face. The first item on the list is "Value" - whether customers will choose to use it, and it's no mistake that it occupies the top spot.

Entrepreneurs, engineers and designers all have a long history of developing tools and methodologies that try to mitigate the Value risk. The agile manifesto, the Lean Startup movement, customer development, the value proposition canvas, Jobs-to-be-done theory and now continuous discovery are all examples.

All of these tools have one thing in common: they urge you to interview your customers, analyze the results, and synthesize your findings as a major input to your roadmap.

Unfortunately, that workflow is inefficient and painful.

Current Landscape

We see three main approaches to solving the problem: manual solutions, feedback aggregators, and User Research platforms.

Of course, manual solutions are the most common. Notion docs, spreadsheets, miro boards, ChatGPT summaries all fall into this bucket.

There are also feedback aggregators on the market, which are of limited value if your goal is to truly understand what your users need.

And lastly, there are products tailored to User Research professionals, which are complex and designed to be used for hours a day, an unreasonable expectation for the product managers we serve.

The Perfect World

We've led over 100 discovery interviews with a simple goal: understand how PMs conduct discovery interviews, and identify opportunities to support that workflow.

We think a perfect solution will:

Analyze user interviews automatically, and eliminate the need for manual opportunity tagging

Perform as well as a trained User Researcher, providing trustworthy results that can always be traced to direct evidence

Synthesize opportunities across interviews to reveal patterns and insights that solve real problems

Why should you care?

We believe that if Product Managers lead more discovery interviews, they'll build better products. But PMs are busy people, and they'll need help to make that a reality. That's why we built fforward.

Do you run problem interviews to help discover insights about your users and customers? Are you tired of manual interview tagging and generic ChatGPT summaries?

If so, sign up below and we'll do our best to support you.