Framing Survey Questions

You're a CEO or VP of marketing wanting to research the market for your product. You know the questions you want answered. Why not whip up a quick survey using a free on-line tool such as SurveyMonkey.com?

The main problem with this approach is that the questions you want answered frequently aren't the questions you should include in a survey.

For example, what if you want to know how much prospective customers are willing to pay for your product? You could just ask them, "How much would you be willing to pay for a product that does blah blah," and provide them a blank to fill in. You will not get reliable results.

A skilled product manager would formulate the questions differently:

1. Ask negative pricing questions. How much does it cost for the prospective customer not to use your product?

2. Ask a conjoint analysis question. If a customer has to choose among several different pricing/feature packages, which one would he choose?

Pricing is one of many examples of questions you may want answered, but that you must formulate indirectly in a survey to get meaningful results.

Another important factor to consider when drafting a survey: you can typically draw the most important conclusions not from the direct responses to each question in the survey, but from uncovering correlations between the responses to different questions.

Comments

Sandra said…

So, how does one determine what question belongs in a survey and one that doesn't and how does one determine the "negative price" of a service?

Tue Oct 25, 02:48:00 PM 2005

Roger L. Cauvin said…

Good (and nontrivial) questions, Sandra. I'm tackling them in new entries to the blog.

Wed Oct 26, 03:33:00 PM 2005

Why Spreadsheets Suck for Prioritizing

The Goal As a company executive, you want confidence that your product team (which includes all the people, from all departments, responsible for product success) has a sound basis for deciding which items are on the product roadmap. You also want confidence the team is prioritizing the items in a smart way. What Should We Prioritize? The items the team prioritizes could be features, user stories, epics, market problems, themes, or experiments. Melissa Perri makes an excellent case for a " problem roadmap ", and, in general, I recommend focusing on the latter types of items. However, the topic of what types of items you should prioritize - and in what situations - is interesting and important but beyond the scope of this blog entry. A Sad but Familiar Story If there is significant controversy about priorities, then almost inevitably, a product manager or other member of the team decides to put together The Spreadsheet. I've done it. Some of the mos

What Product Managers Can Learn from the Apple iPod

The Story When Apple unveiled its iPod digital music player back in October 2001, I dismissed it as a parity product . I already owned the Cowon iAUDIO CW100 MP3 player, loaded with my favorite tunes. There was Apple, generating great hype over the iPod as if it were a breakthrough product. The idea of a portable digital music player was nothing new. The first mass-produced MP3 players came out in 1998. In late 2001, the concept may have been new to a lot of Apple customers, but it wasn't new to me. I proudly showed my MP3 player to friends when they gushed about the iPod. Thus Apple's iPod was not an innovative product in and of itself. Years later, however, I realized the significance of ecosystem of which the iPod was a part. Apple had released iTunes (with technology purchased from SoundJam MP ) and created the iTunes Store for finding and downloading music. Unlike Napster , it was a safe and legal way of distributing and acquiring music. The prior way of playing

Interaction Design: the Neglected Skill

Your product development organization has a big, gaping hole in it. (Be prepared to feel defensive as you continue reading.) One of the most important roles in product development is the role of interaction designer. An interaction designer designs how the users will interact with the product and conceptualize the tasks they perform. He decides whether, for example, the user interface will be command driven, object oriented (clicking on objects then specifying what to do with them), or wizard based. The interaction designer decides the individual steps in the use cases. Every company has one or more people that play the interaction designer role. Usually, those people have little or no expertise in interaction design. Sadly, they typically don't even realize how unqualified they are. Let's see who typically plays the role at companies. Engineer . An engineer is an expert on building what is designed. Yes, an engineer may know how to design the internal structure of the hardw

Cauvin

Search This Blog