Making Informed Product Design Decisions with Michelle Fitzpatrick

The Aurelius podcast is a show that brings you insights, thoughts and tactics from leading UX designers, product leaders and user researchers from across multiple industries and companies. Hosted by Zack Naylor, the show is brought to you byAurelius — the user research and insights tool for design and product teams. You can subscribe on iTunes, SoundCloud, Stitcher.

Our guest this time is Michelle Fitzpatrick, a Senior Product Manager at Intercom, the very popular and growing customer messaging platform for apps and websites.

Michelle and I had a chat about her time over the course of many years at Intercom, going from a smaller team to a very fast growing company and how to still make sense of your products and customers along the way.

Michelle has a passion for applying an understanding of customers to her work as a product manager to make the best decisions possible — something I share a passion for personally — and she had a lot to share on how she and the Intercom team does that.

Michelle even shared a few stories of how user research saved the day from building the wrong thing, as well as how they use customer research and feedback to make design and product decisions at Intercom.

For Michelle, user research and creating a closer, constant contact with Intercom’s customers and even the product itself helps her build this sense of gut feeling or intuition that she really attributes to Intercom’s product success.

She gave many tactical and practical examples of how to do this yourself and some stories in how she did so herself at Intercom.

It’s a common theme here on the Aurelius podcast that we hear so many of our brilliant guests talk about user research and building that intuition for your customers and how that is the most common factor for making successful products, designs and features.

It’s no surprise then that we built our product, Aurelius, to help you do just that. Aurelius is a user research and insights tool for designers, researchers and product leaders to help you organize of all your research insights in one place, make sense of what you learned and share them with your team in order to make awesome design, product and feature decisions. You can check it out for a 14 day free trial over at our website.

Listen to Episode 25 for highlights with Michelle Fitzpatrick including:

• Product management at Intercom
• Choosing the right problems to solve for your customers
• What user research looks like at Intercom
• How Michelle and the product team at Intercom chooses which projects to work on
• Where does UX design start and Product Management end?

Michelle Fitzpatrick is a Senior Product Manager at Intercom. You can find her on twitter here.

Like what you read and heard? There’s more where that came from on theAurelius Podcast. If you’re looking to get the most out of your user research and customer feedback insights, check out Aurelius for a 14 day free trial.