This survey was borne of our own personal frustrations. I’m part of the team at OpinionX, an early stage startup founded in late 2019. We recently found ourselves at a crossroads where we had conducted over 100 in-depth interviews with our target user base. After wading through an unimaginable volume of transcripts and qualitative data, we still weren’t 100% sure if our value proposition was connecting with our target users or moving us towards Product-Market Fit. We needed to understand if the problem we were solving was important to product managers.

OpinionX was built to enable customers to stack rank their problems, so we decided to ‘eat our own dogfood’ and use our platform for ourselves. We created a stack ranking survey to understand the relative importance of the problem we were solving compared to all the other challenges PMs face. 

If our challenge of interest ended up being a low ranking problem, then it’s not worth solving as we would never get the attention of our target users. If it was a high ranking problem, that would signify a large opportunity and potential for organic demand.

We asked 145 Product Managers to vote on a set of problem statements, sharing whether they agreed or disagreed with a number of statements as well as selecting which statement was most important to them out of a randomly selected pair of problems. Participants in the stack ranking survey also contributed new problem statements which allowed us to discover problems PMs face that we weren’t previously aware of.

Below are the 10 problems that participants ranked as most important along with a link to the full dataset at the bottom.

Top 10 Problems According to 100+ Product Managers

1st: Finding product-market fit for a new product/feature is an ongoing challenge as a PM.

2nd: Stakeholders want to talk more about solutions than about problems, but we need to understand the problem first.

3rd: My attention is pulled in too many directions at once

4th: Coordinating efforts across teams and organizations consumes so much time and energy.

5th: It takes too long to conduct robust user research so we end up cutting corners sometimes.

6th: Getting an organisation to focus on a single objective/metric is difficult.

7th: Our organizational knowledge is too disjointed (customer success, marketing, data science), we need a way to share knowledge cross-functionally.

8th: It's difficult to know if an idea has really been validated before we start building.

9th: We struggle to provide a smooth onboarding experience.

10th: Balancing time and effort needed to design and plan future work against time needed to develop existing priorities is a major challenge in a small dev team.

View The Full Dataset:

What We Learned

By asking Product Managers to stack rank their problems in order of importance, we realised that we were using the wrong messaging and positioning for our startup. At the time of this survey our positioning was “Discover your users’ biggest unmet needs”, however the problem statement for “unmet needs” ranked almost last in importance to PMs. Instead, we realised that OpinionX is capable of solving much bigger problems for PMs; helping them to find product-market fit and pick the right problem to work on. 

Having spent 7 months interviewing over 100 target users, we learned more in one day about our product messaging, value proposition and positioning by using a stack ranking survey. Using this data, we revised our website and UI to reposition our product towards helping Product Managers find product/market fit and validate the importance of the problems they are trying to solve. 

It’s free to create a Customer Problem Stack Rank on OpinionX and only takes 60 seconds to setup - try it for yourself today.