Superhuman Uses Video to Keep Everyone Focused on the Customer
February 2021
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4 min read
Superhuman is more than the fastest email experience ever made — it"s designed to make its users feel happier. By taking hassle out of the inbox, the product inspires a lot of love. Superhuman understands that the only way to continuously improve upon the experience is to gather feedback directly from the users themselves.
Ketki Duvvuru was hired as Superhuman’s first dedicated Product Manager, and being laser-focused on the customer herself, she knew exactly how to support the business’ success: share customer feedback to ensure stakeholders remain aligned around the end user’s needs.
As she embarked on this mission to get everyone across the org closer to the voice of the customer, Ketki needed to check off a couple of important boxes:
- Engage in authentic communication that gets to a better understand of how to truly delight users ✓
- Build an efficient, scalable share out process that would rally the entire org around customer needs ✓
The Challenge: Relying on Memory Alone Takes Away From User Interviews, While Old School Video Editing is Tedious & Time-Consuming
Ketki understood the unique power of sharing insights with video. But while video insights might sound great on paper, actually pulling clips together from hours of interview recordings, relying on memory and old school tech, was a different story altogether:
A Quick Point on Note Taking: Of course you need some kind of mental bookmark while conducting feedback sessions — how are you supposed to remember what topics were brought up, in what tone, at what point in the conversation, or even by whom, from memory alone? The challenge with note taking, however, lies in the difficulty (many would even say impossibility) of multitasking. As Ketki alludes to in the video above, it’s incredibly difficult to be fully present with your participants and take copious notes to help you recall the conversations later on.
But more on this later in our story...
Pre-Superhuman, Ketki worked as a PM at online people platform company Gusto, where she also conducted — and recorded — user feedback sessions. Because she understood how powerful it was, she wanted to share her findings on video...but as she mentioned in the video highlight above, using iMovie to edit her recordings into more consumable, shareable clips had become a giant, painstaking thorn in her side.
Enter: Reduct.Video
Success Story #1: Helping the Team Efficiently Engage with Research Insights
Ketki brought her affinity for Reduct with her from Gusto to Superhuman, removing the traditional video editing constraints that would have prevented her from sharing concise and compelling video highlights with engineering and beyond. While other video editing methods might have taken hours or even days, with Reduct, Ketki was able to have a 30-minute conversation with one customer, spend just 30 minutes reviewing the interview transcript and pulling short video highlights, and then easily share those highlights with the team.
One huge benefit of these video share outs created in Reduct is that the full team gains a more vivid view of the customer’s experience, which helps better understand and serve those customers.
"People that don’t normally talk to customers day in and day out got to experience a piece of how [the customer] felt, and it was a digestible format — a 3-minute video, everyone will watch...If you really understand your customers and their needs, then you can build something that meets that need and takes it beyond just solving a problem, but even crafting an experience that delights our customers.
Success Story #2: Sharing a Multitude of Insights With a Single Video
And with Reduct, Ketki and her colleagues are now able to better invest their time in the research process. Because anyone can pop into Reduct and glean multiple insights from a single recording, the initial 1:1 time with the customer only needs to be invested once, while the value gained from the insights stored within that interview is ongoing. Multiply that by 10 customer interviews, and the time savings across the team becomes monumental.
In addition to the time savings, Ketki can use those multiple recordings to build highlight reels that more effectively communicate common challenges or customer love with the broader team.
"While [a colleague] spent hours finding these customers, talking to them, uploading the content, and drawing out her synthesis, I was able to put in maybe two or three hours to also feel like I had a really good handle on the 10 conversations she had and could help come to my own conclusions as well...The time spent is more effective, and the data gathered is just higher leverage to the entire company.
Success Story #3: An Impetus for Cross-Functional Alignment
AReduct also helps Ketki open the value of customer research up beyond product and engineering, to other stakeholders in the organization, which keeps everyone aligned around the customer — across departments, from top to bottom.
If every single employee watches it, it’s still valuable to everyone on the team. It’s something we can send out more broadly to people we know aren’t doing customer conversations day in and day out.”_
The Result: Reduct Helps Power Superhuman’s Customer Research Engine
With Reduct, Ketki is able to run many interviews at once and not worry about losing anything in the synthesis process down the line. In fact, Reduct helps make the feedback synthesis even richer, as she can now listen to and read over the interview content multiple times to pull out the most valuable moments.
Watching highlight reels that feature multiple customers responding to a question with a consistent response has also been a game-changer for the Superhuman team, as these insights help inform strategic decisions about where to focus and which customer needs to address. As Ketki says in the video highlight below, “This is the magic stuff that we’re really excited about.”
Bonus Result! How Reduct Helps Ketki Conduct More Authentic Interviews
We told you we’d come back to note taking! As Ketki mentions in the video highlight above, because she no longer has to take copious notes during her interviews, she can stay focused on what really matters most: authentic communication with the customer. Beyond allowing her to easily work with video to share impactful customer insights in concise and compelling ways across the company, Reduct also helps Ketki conduct better research by staying more present in her interviews.
Interested in seeing how Reduct can help your team take user research to the next level? Get going with our free trial or get in touch with us to schedule a demo.
