“Do you like the conference so far?” begins Prakriti Parijat of DBS Bank. After cheers from the #mtpcon Singapore crowd, she turns the response around: “What is wrong with that question?” Everyone immediately recognizes that it was a leading question.
It is tempting to ask customers what they want, but you won’t get a good answer. Because what they really want is to be liked. We may say “there is no such thing as a dumb question,” but in research, this isn’t true. Leading questions don’t provide good insights – the participants want to answer “correctly” and end up giving the responses you want rather than the real information you need.
Many product managers will say their foremost challenge is “being able to conduct proper research to validate whether the market truly needs what they’re building”. But while we look to research as the solution, Prakriti says that research not done right won’t help to answer this question either…
