Skip to main content

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

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

Popular posts from this blog

Dancer Test

Are you left-brained or right-brained? Supposedly, your brain lateralization determines how you view this animation. Some people see her rotating clockwise. Others see her rotating counter-clockwise. Some see her unpredictably changing the direction of her rotation. Supposedly, people who see clockwise rotation are right brained. People who see counter-clockwise rotation are left brained. I originally came across this animation here .

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...

5 Ways Companies Make Product Decisions

In the last blog entry, we reviewed the  four problems that companies face, or are trying to overcome, as they make product decisions .  Now we'll look at the ways that most companies make their product decisions. Companies that develop, market, and sell products and solutions make strategic and ongoing tactical decisions.  They decide what features to include in their products, what messages they will use to communicate the value of their products, what marketing tactics they will use, what prospective customers they will target, and many day-to-day choices. Whether or not these decisions are deliberate or ad hoc, most companies use some combination of the following ways of making product decisions. (A downloadable "map" that summarizes the product decision landscape is included at the end of this article.) Customer Wants Product decisions based on feature requests, focus groups, and what prospects and customers say they want. Companies are selling products to ...