What is Songkick?
Songkick is a concert discovery service that helps you track artists and buy tickets for live music events.
Michelle You is Co-Founder of Songkick. At the Future of Web Apps Conference Michelle outlines Songkick’s process.
Time is your enemy
In a startup, youre under constant time pressure. You don’t have time to waste building the wrong thing but youre not Steve Jobs so how do you know what to build? The answer; Product Discovery.
Speed of learning
You need to learn about your users as fast as possible. Speed and quantity of learning is everything.
Product leadership trio
At Songkick the product discovery process is lead by the combination of the Product Manager, Design Lead and Tech Lead. The business needs, user needs and the technical engineering aspects of the product discovery process are discussed by the trio for an hour after the daily standup – the agenda – how do we move the product discovery process forward?
Songkick’s Product Discovery Layers
Songkick breaks down their product discovery process into layers. They always follow the process from bottom to top. Theres no point testing the colour of buttons if you don’t understand the customers problem you are trying to solve!
Get cheap and fast feedback
Quantitative and qualitative feedback methods are part of Songkick’s Toolkit. – What people are doing with your product?
a) Analytics
Data can give you answers to this question. Eg. Whats your conversion rate at this step? Where are people dropping off?
b) Real time behaviour feedback
Crazy Egg is used to work out hot spots and how far people are scrolling down a page
c) A/B tests
Split testing will prove which version of a page will perform better
d) In app feedback tools
Qualaroo for surveys and Olark – which can pop up while users are on Songkick and ask questions; eg Why did you come to the site today? What were you looking for on this page?
e) Mock up and click tests
You can tell if an interface is working without writing any code with tools such as Helio and Usabilla.
f) Remote usability tools
Songkick also use remote usability testing solutions eg usertesting.com and whatusersdo.com
g) Face to face
Michelle’s favourite method for user feedback; sitting down with users face to face and asking questions.
Real example product discovery process for Detour
Detour is a marketplace for fans – where fans can make pledges to bands to appear in a certain city.
Before building anything Songkick conducted interview with agents, artists, promoters and venues. During dozens of interviews they asked the same questions and recorded answers. Then the team looked for patterns in the results in order to determine what problems the industry has.
Questions included
What is the process an artist goes through to book a tour?
What are the interactions between the stakeholders in the process?
What are pain points and frustrations?
Customer discovery interview tips
Write an interview script and repeat for every interview?
Ask open ended questions and listen
Ask respondents to tell you stories about specific experiences – not generalisations
Dont ask respondents to predict future behaviour
Pair interview with a colleague
Transcribe audio into text
Synthesize interviews into nuggets of insights
From studying the interview transcripts – the team looks for patterns within the answers given. They distill these into golden nuggets of insights and feed those insights back to the wider team.
Product proposition landing page tests
Having identified the customer problem. How do we know what solution to build? Landing page tests provide a very quick way to test a product proposition.
By summarising a proposition into a single line of text with a ‘pre-sign up’ capture form is a great method to glean resonance with customers. Split testing different headlines helps the team to work out the best performing ideas and language.
What if the new feature doesn’t work?
The first step if a product isnt performing as planned is to diagram their funnel. They do this by screengrabbing every step in the users process to perform an action.
Next the product trio came up with a list of questions about the funnel for users engaging with their new feature. The key was to work out – where are people dropping off in the funnel? Then try to diagnose the problem eg is this a usability issue or do people don’t know what to do?
On all the key pages of the funnel the questions raised by the team are then converted into analytics events that will fire on key events on each page eg clicking submit.
Why is the feature not working?
The data is telling Songkick “what” is not working. Usability labs are used to determine the “why”.
It turns out users didn’t add their credit card to pledge to artists because they didn’t realise they had to.
How to fix the problem?
Songkick forms a team – including people outside the core product team – in a group setting called a design studio.
Design studio tips
Frame the problem clearly
Give participants time to come up with their own ideas before meeting in a group
Agree on the best ideas and prototype different options
A/B Testing
The final stage of finding a new solution is to run split tests. Songkick don’t just run random tests. They follow a template for each variant.
If…
Then…
Because…
Each split test result is recorded. Once the tests are run and a winner is chosen. The final version is implemented and the code for other variants are removed.
In conclusion
Songkick manage 3 to 4 product discovey tests a week. The speed and quantity of learning is key. Ultimately the product team is looking for the cheapest and fastest way to get feedback.