The 3 Contexts. Part 2: Data

Understand your users and your data.

Following on from this series’ intro post, and part 1, here’s an overview of some ways to quickly figure out your first impressions of the user and data context. This step allows you to challenge your assumptions, create new hypotheses quickly and point your discovery in the right direction.

Recapping quickly - creating context is vital to you onboarding and creating impact fast as a PM. Breaking your time down into figuring out 3 key themes - Business, User & Data and Technical contexts - can help you move quickly, build relationships and ensure you get valuable answers to the questions you ask.

You bring assumptions into every scenario. I remember in my first product job at the BBC, I was convinced that our users would be super motivated to share feedback about the content we were publishing. Turns out I was mostly wrong, and we ended up changing our strategy to develop a more analytics driven product.

Focusing on data as part of your first cycles on a new product is valuable because it allows you to challenge assumptions you already have, and also stand up hypotheses that you may not have thought about.?

If you can, run queries on analytics data you have. Use the opportunity to learn a new thing if you’ve never tried it before.

Ask someone to walk you through research or metrics. If there is nothing at all, then try to create some proxies with 3rd party data that can help you ask some initial questions.?

Even better - if you can - do this with your team, and ask them to point out what seems weird or interesting to them. It’ll set you up to have those conversations about metrics later down the line too.

Starting to isolate some key metrics, outlying insights, and asking for help from folks who know your product better than you do will help you qualify the assumptions you are bringing to the table, and also give you a first taste of what’s really going on with your product.

NEXT: Part 3 - Understanding tech.