Amazon Music Leader on Product Design (Part 2)
One challenge that we face in the product design process is identifying service gaps and opportunities to outshine our competitors. As a result, the question is “how do I make the right decision?” I have found that asking your customers how they would design a product is a helpful exercise to ensure that you make the best decisions.
Your customers have a natural urge to tell you how to fix a product or what their solution would be. In general, their answers tend to be wrong – but it’s important to observe how they interact with your product. The most important insights come from understanding the pain points that they experience. For example, if customers could not remember how to download a song, we can make changes to make it easier to access content.
In addition to listening to your customers, there are key insights to be gained from “listening” to your competitors. This is not to suggest that you should attempt to copy your competitors. Instead, you need to understand how other services are setting customer expectations. For example, we look at usability studies and industry macro trends to identify which features are most important for customers.
As product leaders, it’s important that we ask the right questions of ourselves and our customers. The depth and integrity of the questions that you ask as a product team will directly impact the quality of your product. Said differently, our job is to talk – but we get paid to listen.
About the speaker
Kintan Brahmbhatt is the Director of Product Management and Engineering Program Management for Amazon Music. After joining Amazon in 2009, Kintan drove product vision and execution for IMDb Everywhere, the IMDb Movies & TV App for mobile devices. In his current role, Kintan helped launch Prime Music in June 2014, which is now one of the most popular streaming services in the world. Recently, Kintan was a key driver of the launch Amazon’s premium music streaming service, Amazon Music Unlimited - focusing on the Amazon Music customer experience with Alexa and Amazon Echo.