You've done your research... now what do you do with it?

One of the most common questions I get is what to do after you've asked the questions.

One of the most common questions I get is what to do after you've asked the questions.

After you’ve done transcriptions.

After you’ve made the journey maps, the job maps, the idea maps, the opportunity maps…

(Or you haven’t—that’s also okay.)

After you’ve done all of this research and accumulated all of this stuff, what do you actually do? How do you know what’s a good opportunity?

In my book, I provided two options this - a pain and frequency-based exercise, and a card sorting interview.

But also, in a world full of good books on journey mapping and product strategy and all of that, I didn’t feel like I needed to write about it. My goal was only to write about the things that were missing from the current crop of books, and so I intentionally avoided topics that I felt were well-covered elsewhere.

And yet, people keep coming to me with this question. So it’s clear there’s a hole, or a disconnect somewhere in how to go from ideas and opportunities to actual priorities. To figuring out which you should build, or pursue, which you should jot down for sometime maybe later in the future, and which you should immediately discard.

So that’s what I’ve been working on over the last few months: a framework for filtering ideas.

The heart of this is a checklist based on an understanding of your business model.

When I worked in a larger company, I can’t remember how many times my team and I would get all jazzed about a problem to solve for customers and then come up with prototypes and plans for how we could solve it with a new experience.

And more often than not, we’d get met with a reaction that was along the lines of “That sounds great… but it doesn’t really fit with our business model.”

And we’d go, okay, sure, it’s not quite how we do business right now, but we could change it! It’d be better for the business and better for the customers! So we can just do things differently!

And then, as you might expect, it would go absolutely nowhere.

(Because no novel idea survives first contact with the business model.)

I have a little more understanding of this now, after six years of full-time entrepreneurship.

But also — understanding the business model isn’t enough. We do have to bring in our Jobs-to-be-Done roots. We need to bring in some academic business frameworks, too.

At this point, if you’re still reading, you’re probably saying, “Okay, so where is this new framework? Get to the gosh darn point already, Michele!”

And here is where I say: it’s not ready. Yet.

I’m still workshopping the concept. Attempting to articulate an internal framework I’ve used for years but never actually articulated is hard.

When I sat down to write Deploy Empathy, I’d been talking about customer research for years. It was all already up there, waiting to come out. I likened it to cleaning out my mental attic.

But this? It needs a bit more time to percolate.

So I’m socializing and workshopping these ideas in two upcoming settings:

JTBD Untangled webinar, Tuesday Sept 26, 12pm US Eastern

Y’all remember Jim Kalbach, the author of my favorite soup-to-nuts JTBD book, The Jobs to Be Done Playbook. Jim invited me to be a guest on his monthly JTBD webinar, and we’ll be talking about filtering ideas.

Register here (free)

MicroConf Europe, Oct 1-3, Lisbon, Portugal

I’ll be giving a longer talk at MicroConf EU in October. This is the one where I’ll really get into the idea framework I’ve been developing. I believe there are still a handful of tickets left.

Register here

And after the idea has had a bit more time to percolate and I make sure I’m articulating what I want to articulate without skipping anything, I promise I’ll write it down and share it with you.

There are also a few other things I’ve been thinking I should write about… stay tuned for that. :)

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PS: I want to give a shout-out to a few folks who’ve mentioned Deploy Empathy recently:

Rob Walling in his new book, The SaaS Playbook:

“In my experience, the conversations you have with customers, whether via email, chat, or on a call, will be some of the most valuable time you spend understanding your market... Deep dives into customer conversations have literally filled books. For a great resource on doing customer interviews as a founder, check out the book Deploy Empathy: A Practical Guide to Inter- viewing Customers by Michele Hansen.”

Ruben Gamez, founder of SignWell, on Arvid Kahl’s Bootstrapped Founder podcast:

“I'm really, really, really impressed with [Deploy Empathy]. I bought it for our customer success person. She really likes it. What I like most about that one, I think is the most helpful for founders. That it's just like the way it talks about it as an ongoing process, is, is very, very, very good and a great mindset for people to get into. And then it just gives you the scripts and all the things to ask and how to ask and all this stuff. I think that one's great.”