Show notes
Most of my clients come to me with a problem. These can be wide ranging from “we are seeing large churn in our app” to “we cannot get stakeholders to sign off on vital UX work”. They are sometimes expressed as a user need such as “we need to make it easier for users to do X” or as a business need such as “we need to increase the number of users who sign up for our demo”. Or sometimes just a scream of frustration! Whatever the case, the ability to diagnose the root causes of these problems and address them is a core part of my role and, I would argue, the role of anybody who is working in digital.Whether you are a product manager, UX designer, developer, marketer or business owner, the ability to troubleshoot these kinds of challenges is essential to being successful in your role.Fortunately, no matter the trouble that needs ‘shooting’, there is an approach you can use to resolve the challenge. Admittedly, it takes practice, experience and nuances that are far beyond what I can cover here. However, hopefully I can at least point you in the right direction.So, let’s take a real challenge that I often encounter and work through the process I use to troubleshoot and resolve it.Our example challengeThere are so many possible challenges I could use, but let’s pick one I hear all the time from marketing teams. They are running ad campaigns and yet they are seeing low conversion rates. They want me to help them understand why users are not acting and work out how to fix it.Well, whatever the challenge is, the first step is to diagnose the problem.Diagnosing the problemObviously that is easier said than done. But, normally I start by brainstorming a list of possible causes. For example, in this case, I might consider the following:The ads are targeting the wrong audience.The ad copy is not compelling enough.The landing page is not converting.Conversions are not being properly tracked.The post landing page experience is flawed in some way.The list could go on, but you get the idea.Narrow the fieldNext we need to identify which of the possible causes is the most likely to be the primary issue. Of course, it could be a combination of a few, so we need to bear that in mind. Problems are rarely black and white.We can do this with good old fashioned research. We might look at the analytics data, carry out user testing or run a survey. The idea is to find supporting evidence that the problem is real and that it is the right one.Once we are fairly confident that we have the right diagnosis, we need to zoom in on exactly the nature of the problem.Get specific about the problemLet’s say for example that the problem turns out to be the landing page experience. Ads are well targeted, but the conversion rate on the landing page is low.Well, what exactly is the problem with the landing page experience? Is it the design, the copy, the call to action or something else?Identifying this might be done through years of experience, research or user testing. However we do it, we need a specific diagnosis before we proceed.Now, at this point, most people will jump into fixing the problem, but that would be a mistake. Before doing that we need to ask, why that problem exists in the first place.Understanding why the problem existsI mean think about it. Is there a marketer on the planet who doesn’t know that a campaign will underperform if the landing page experience is poor?It’s easy to assume that the cause is incompetence, but that is rarely the case. Often there are underlying issues that have prevented the problem being addressed.For example, the solution might be to have customized landing pages for each campaign. But there are often barriers that prevent this. Barriers like:A lack of design and development capacity.No template that can be used.An overly restrictive template that cannot be customized for a specific campaign.A lack of time to produce multiple landing pages.Technological limitations.Legal or compliance issues.Again, I could go on.**Identifying these blockers is the most important part of troubleshooting. **Giving them a new beautiful landing page will not fix the problem if they cannot use it. Your solution has to be practical within the constraints of the real world or you need to at least be able to make a compelling case for why these barriers have to be addressed.Addressing the barriersThis is where you need to get creative. Ideally you want to circumvent the barriers, rather than try to overcome them. This will prove far more successful and faster to do.For example, it is not going to be easy to get more design and development capacity or replace the tech stack.Circumventing the barriersInstead, you need to look for workarounds that will get people 80% of the way there, even if it is not perfect. In the case of our landing pages, that might be to create a landing page playbook that teaches AI and marketers how to easily create high converting landing pages in minutes. A playbook that takes into account the constraints within which the organization operates.In fact, this is such a common scenario I have a packaged approach to do exactly this. This is so much more effective than some report telling people everything that is wrong or a prototype showing best practice, because they don’t address the underlying barriers.Of course, you cannot always circumvent the barriers. Sometimes they need to be overcome.Overcoming the barriersI came across this scenario recently. I recommended to a large charity that they needed customized landing pages for their fundraising campaigns. Unfortunately, their tech stack just didn’t allow for it without significant development investment and it just wasn’t a priority.My job therefore was to make it a priority. I had to build them a business case that showed this was a job that should be done and done soon.Step one was to gather evidence that the limitations of their tech stack were causing the organization real damage. We did that by running a test campaign with a custom landing page that did not use their tech stack.This was easy enough to spin up with the help of AI, despite still plugging into the existing tech stack for the actual donation.We tracked the number of people entering the donation flow and compared it to the numbers from previous campaigns. The uplift was significant.Despite poor tracking of average donation amounts, and lifetime value of donors, we were able to make some estimates about the financial impact of the improved landing page. Or put another way, we were able to estimate how much the barrier (existing tech stack) was costing the organization for each and every campaign they ran.These figures, alongside our proof of concept test, could be rolled into a business case alongside a small ask that the fundraising team be allowed to create landing pages separately from the existing tech stack, until resources were available to fix the issue.Notice I didn’t suggest the whole tech stack should be replaced. Neither did I demand development resources should be allocated immediately. Instead I suggested a small, temporary solution that would allow the organization to recover the money lost to the tech stack.Checking you actually fixed anythingSo, you have a solution that survives contact with the real world. But, that is not the end of the job.Yes, this is the point where everybody wants to move on, and I understand why. The fix has shipped, the pressure is off, and there is always another problem waiting. But, if nobody goes back to look at the numbers, you have no way of knowing whether you diagnosed the problem correctly or simply got lucky. You also throw away the evidence that would have made your next business case much easier to win. So, agree up front what you are going to measure and when you are going to look at it again.In our landing page example that might be the conversion rate per campaign, the point where people abandon the page, or the number of campaign pages the team manages to produce in a month. Pick 1 or 2 numbers, write down where they sit today, and put a date in the diary to revisit them. If the numbers have not moved, you have not solved the problem, you have only relocated it.The questions, in orderIf you take nothing else from this, take the order of the questions.What do we think the problem is?What evidence do we have that it is the real problem?What exactly about it is broken?Why has nobody fixed it already?Can we go around that barrier, or do we have to knock it down?How will we know whether it worked?Yes, most of us can answer question one in our sleep. But, the value sits in questions four and five, and those are the two it is easy to skip on the way to a nice slide deck of recommendations.A slower way of working, and worth itI am not going to pretend this is quicker than firing over a list of improvements. It isn’t. It involves awkward conversations about why the obvious fix has been sitting undone for 3 years, and those conversations are rarely fun.But, advice that nobody can act on is just an expensive opinion, and I have written more of those than I care to admit.It is also difficult when you work in-house. There are politics and hierarchies to navigate. That is where getting some outside help can make a difference. They sit outside of those structures and tend to be seen as more impartial.So if you are struggling with a barrier that needs to be circumvented or a problem that you just cannot solve, give me a shout.