Seeing is believing: Get stakeholders closer to customers with watch parties
Why you should let customers speak for themselves, and how to get started
The moment just before a movie begins is filled with anticipation — of being transported through time, space, or just another person’s perspective. Going to the movies is a form of permission to explore another world and imagine alternative realities.
Hosting watch parties are a way to immerse stakeholders in this kind of temporary getaway. But instead of traveling to far off places like British Hong Kong in the 1960s or some dystopian future, watch parties center on the lived experiences of your customers.
What is a watch party?
A watch party is an event that enables stakeholders hear customer feedback or see customer experiences directly.
This can either be about your or competitor products. Viewing can take place either live or asynchronously, in person or online. Stakeholders can range from product managers, engineers, and analysts to designers, marketers, and strategists — essentially anyone who can impact customer experiences.
Why host one?
Like any form of exposure to customers, watch parties increase a team’s focus on the customer in the experiences they create. Actively listening to the customer’s voice can help stakeholders form a much deeper connection to what’s being said. This is often more credible and powerful than if the message is framed and delivered by the researcher.
Imagine if I told you about a research trip I recently took, versus if we had taken the journey together. Telling you about the trip would be much more efficient — a TL;DR version of the experience. But experiencing it together would give you a much higher fidelity sense of the journey. You would know not just what was said and done, but also the smell and sounds of the environment, the complex and nuanced emotions of participants. This is what the agency Stripe Partners calls “embodied experience.”
By contrast, lower fidelity approaches to customer exposure might include chat messages, email updates, reports, and presentations. A watch party falls somewhere between the lo-fi and hi-fi sides of the customer exposure spectrum, and it can lean closer to one side or the other — depending on how you do it.
Watch parties can be a way to engage stakeholders if you find that your research findings are falling flat or not having the impact that you’d like. It can also be a means of involving team members in research sessions if they’re unable or not yet willing to make time to attend live sessions. In fact, overcoming scheduling issues was my initial reason to begin holding watch parties. This was before I realized they could take on different forms and evolve to much more.
Planning your party
The audience, content, and cadence are key factors to consider as you plan. Note that these are interdependent and can change over time.
1. Making your guest list
Who is your target audience?
Ask yourself if you’re aiming for attendance from a certain team, or if you’re looking to engage a broader group of stakeholders. For example, at Atlassian, I run an ongoing watch party with a team that focuses on pricing experiences. But there are also other watch parties organized for broader audiences (e.g. “Show and Trello” which is open to anyone that works on Trello).
You’ll want to tailor your program to the audience, so identifying the scope of your audience can help shape the party theme. With a smaller group, you’ll likely want to be more focused. Whereas with a larger group, you can potentially aim for a more general interest area or a broader range of topics.
2. Curating content
Will you focus on one story or feature a range of perspectives?
The content you feature will depend not only on what’s relevant to your audience, but also what’s available to you in terms of access to customers. Research ethics should be a baseline consideration: make sure that you have informed consent from your customers to be observed live and/or to share recordings of sessions with others internally.
Based on the content (and stakeholder time) available to you, consider the pros and cons of highlighting a single vs. multiple customers:
- Focusing on a single customer allows for stakeholders to develop a richer, more in-depth understanding of a customer. However, it can also enable the risk of anchoring and misunderstanding by over-indexing on a single story. I would not recommend this approach unless the customer is archetypal of others in your research, or you have ongoing parties and can ensure stakeholders will see other customer stories.
- Featuring multiple customers allows for stakeholders to see a wider breadth of experiences. But the more customers or clips you include, the more shallow your understanding of each story will be. Note that this approach also requires more logistical preparation — whether it be in booking participants or finding the right clips (and possibly editing them at the right time stamps).
Another content consideration is if you’ll be highlighting customer(s) speaking in an interview, interacting directly with your or competitor products — or some combination of both. Some stakeholders are curious about customers and thus able to engage deeply with interviews, while others are most captivated by watching customers interact with something they’ve made, like a website or app. Feel free to experiment with different formats and see what resonates with your stakeholders.
3. Setting your cadence
Will the party be one-off or an ongoing event?
My foray into watch parties began on a project-by-project basis, with different stakeholders each time. I currently host an ongoing event with the same team as well. Don’t be afraid to start as a one-off and see how it goes!
For ongoing events, consider the appetite and availability of your audience. At a minimum, aim for at least 1 hour every 3 weeks (as per Jared Spool’s evidence-based recommendation at least 2 hours of exposure hours every 6 weeks).
Ongoing events have more potential impact to create a customer-centric culture, but preparing for them is also a time commitment. To ensure the sustainability of the event (and your own bandwidth), you may want to think about if and how you can enlist others to help — for instance, in co-curating content, alternating hosting responsibilities, inviting guest hosts, etc.
Hosting your party
Once you’ve thought about your audience, content, and cadence, don’t forget to think about your guests’ intended experience.
Setting the party ‘vibe’
Do you want the event to feel like a casual, social event or an action-oriented town hall? A couple of pros and cons of each:
- A casual, social event might better enable stakeholders to connect with customers as people. This has the potential benefit of stakeholders being more open-minded about negative feedback. Another added bonus of this approach might be in helping you cultivate better working relationships with your stakeholders. But the downside is that social events may be seen as optional, decreasing engagement.
- An action-oriented town hall suggests that stakeholders should be open to making decisions and taking initiative based on insights presented. This has the potential benefit to deliver more tangible outcomes, as opposed to the social approach’s more indirect benefit of sharpening intuition about customers through exposure.
Regardless of your approach, think about what cues or affordances you will give guests to set the vibe:
- The language in your communications about the event (e.g. using emoji vs. a more formal tone)
- How many people are invited, and what their roles in the organization are
- Whether or not to send an agenda to guests ahead of time
- Providing snacks or prompting guests to bring their own
- Props, decorations, and room layout (if in person) or video backgrounds (if remote)
Establish house rules
Remember that the primary goal of a watch party is engagement, and you are the host. Your stakeholders may have varying degrees of experience with customer research, so it’s important to set the tone and create a shared understanding of norms and expectations.
These core guidelines from Michael Margolis of GV (formerly known as Google Ventures) are a good starting point:
Try to see and understand the world through participants’ eyes.
Focus on your observations. Don’t jump to conclusions. (And for Pete’s sake: Don’t make premature changes to the product or prototype during the sessions!)
Be careful about taking participants’ comments too literally. Watch what they do vs. what they say.
Don’t dismiss feedback from participants you disagree with, or who don’t match your assumptions or expectations.
Respect participants’ privacy, and protect their PII. Don’t go digging into their accounts without their explicit permission.
To further engage the audience, make sure to encourage and facilitate discussion in-between clips or in an ongoing “sidebar” chat (if remote). Sometimes I think of the chat as a kind of “director’s commentary,” where I might preview insights that will be shared in a future presentation.
For more formal workshops, feel free to give your stakeholders worksheets or explicit prompts to listen more attentively. A few examples:
- Are customers are speaking in active or passive voice? Do they have agency in their story, or are events happening to them?
- What kinds of emotional reactions are they having?
- What is the reasoning behind their decisions? Do they express any guiding principles to explain their behaviors?
Closing thoughts before show time
Movies come in various genres and styles – from the action-packed blockbuster and the romantic comedy, to the character-driven indie film and the timely, thoughtful documentary. These appeal to different types of audiences and can range in their impact, including making people laugh or cry, helping them empathize with new perspectives, and understanding complex situations more holistically. Your watch parties too can take on a range of different forms and purposes; iterate and learn.
As people can both love and hate the same movie, you may find that audience members can have differing responses to the same content. There’s no need to back away from potentially polarizing footage; in fact, watch parties can be a good way to drive consensus among stakeholders. To do so though, make sure to build in time to engage in discussion.
Last but not least, remember to have fun! It is meant to be a party after all. :)
Many thanks to Alex Jones for inspiring our first ongoing watch party and to Ruth Kaplan and Tim Dixon for reviewing this post.
