The product manager’s guide to user research: A tactical approach for PMs

At the center of strategy, design, and development, you’ll find a product manager. This cross-departmental role has the mission to make decisions that drive product success. And if we know anything, it’s that the best decisions are fueled by user insights.

Maze’s Future of User Research Report 2025 found that 42% of product managers already conduct user research—with companies citing business growth as a key objective fueling that research demand. But product managers (PMs) aren’t utilizing all the benefits that user research brings, and many PMs still hesitate to take the plunge.

So how does user research come into play for product managers (PMs)? How can you use research to ship better products, faster? What techniques and tactics should you be prioritizing? Let’s find out.

User research is important for product managers because it helps ground product strategy decisions in real user needs. By understanding users, PMs can decide which features are worth developing or changing, effectively ensuring product success.

Every successful product solution evolved from a problem to be solved. User research is one of the best ways to get a clear vision of that problem, and the nuanced motivations and challenges that come with it.

In simple terms, all successful products start with users. The best part? You don’t need to be a UX researcher to collect insights. Here are six steps for PMs to conduct user research.

Do your users drop off mid-sign-up process? Perhaps you’re unsure which new feature to prioritize? Or maybe you don’t understand your users' jobs-to-be-done?

These are the kind of questions that user research can answer. Research can be either:

Once you’ve defined your problem and identified the corresponding type of user research you need, this sets the direction for your entire UX research project.

If you don’t know where to begin, ask yourself:

User research doesn’t have to be confusing or time-consuming, so long as you choose the right UX research methods.

They broadly fall into two categories:

It depends on your problem. For example, interviews can help uncover why users are frustrated using a particular feature. But if you’re in a time crunch, an unmoderated open-ended survey or in-product prompts can deliver insights faster.

Kevin Liu, Vice President of Product at Octoparse, shares his take on how PMs can choose the right research method: “From my experience, the most PM-friendly customer research methods are the ones that are quick to execute but still provide solid directional insights.”

“Things like user surveys, in-app feedback prompts, and thematic analysis of customer support calls are great because they don’t interrupt development but still surface patterns.”

Kevin also recommends a workaround for PMs who want to understand user pain points: “Another underrated tactic is listening in on sales or onboarding calls. You get to hear pain points straight from the user without needing to schedule formal interviews.”

You can also utilize UX research tools (especially ones with AI to help automate research) to speed things up: “We also run quick usability tests on prototypes through tools like Maze and Figma to validate ideas fast before devs even write code.”

Insights from UX research are only valuable if they represent your user base and target audience. As such, you’ll likely need to recruit research participants who match your user personas. Manual ways to recruit research participants include using advanced search filters on social media, such as LinkedIn, or searching niche communities.

However, these participant recruitment methods can be time-consuming for busy PMs. Instead, consider using a recruitment panel. For example, Maze Panel gives you access to over three million vetted testers in more than 130 countries. With over 140 filters, ranging from professional experience to demographics, you can narrow down your product niche and quickly recruit pre-qualified participants.

A simple, straightforward UX research plan helps you move steadfastly toward insights. It should answer the following questions:

When talking to users, your goal is to listen and understand, not to influence. Avoid leading questions that push participants toward a specific answer. For example, let’s say you’re designing an open-ended survey. Here’s a list of neutral, objective user research questions vs. leading questions you should avoid.

Running your research study is where preparation meets practice. However, not all research methods will require your presence. For example, you can deploy unmoderated methods—like surveys, unmoderated usability testing, or in-product prompts—and just wait for the insights to roll in.

If you’re conducting a moderated study like a usability test or an interview, here are a few tips to keep in mind:

Whatever your research method, it’s helpful to enlist a user research tool like Maze to speed up your process and automate some of the technical (or just time-intensive) parts.

While you can do every step manually, an intuitive research tool is the best way to speed up your time-to-insight and centralize design, deployment, data collection, analysis and reporting through one comprehensive platform.

With your responses collected, you’re ready to turn crude data into actionable insights that fuel data-backed product decisions.

Your analysis method will depend on the type of research you conducted.

For example, let’s say insights reveal that 50% of participants were frustrated with your product’s onboarding flow, and 47% of participants didn’t even bother to finish it. A qualitative insight details that users are overwhelmed with your tool’s dashboard, stating: “There’s just too much going on. I can’t figure out where to begin.”

Examples of strategically integrating this product feedback into the product design might be:

Understanding user perspectives leads to better product decisions. But that doesn’t mean research is always easy to fit into your product management process.

From fast dev sprints and deadlines to disinterested stakeholders, there can be a few barriers standing between PMs and insights. Here are some of the challenges you might face in bringing user research to product management—and how to overcome them.

PMs are often racing against the clock, collaborating with multiple departments to align business goals with product decisions. Adding user research to the mix may just seem like another bottleneck.

However, this is far from the case.

PMs don’t need to do all-out research projects with dozens of participants. Instead, they can pepper in user research methods and projects throughout the product development process.

A quick in-app survey, lightweight 5-second tests, and letting AI automate user interviews with a few users per sprint is enough to inject your product with real insights.

As Arvind Rongala, Product Manager and CEO of Edstellar, puts it:

“I rely on quick feedback loops, such as click testing, user interviews, or straightforward ‘talk-aloud’ sessions. Long decks and labs are not necessary. You can tell where your product is flawed just by watching others try to use it.”

Users most likely won’t deliver responses or insights in the form of product solutions. They’ll give you stories, behaviors, and frustrations—they’ll show you the problem.

It’s up to PMs to turn those insights into strategic decisions grounded in user opinions. This is precisely why conducting user research and analyzing user feedback is so critical to building a product that users actually want.

Arvind elaborates: “Some PMs avoid research because users don’t know the right thing to build. Or they’re afraid the criticism [from user research] would ruin their brilliant ideas. As a result, they follow their gut and fail.”

Avoiding this pitfall is more of a mindset shift that trickles down into your approach toward user research. Instead of asking users what they want, ask them about what they do, what they’re trying to achieve, and the challenges they encounter along the way. Users’ needs, repeated across multiple sessions, will point you to your ideal solution.

Stakeholders might overlook research for the same reasons anyone does—it’s perceived as expensive and time-consuming. But stakeholders are always on the lookout for solutions that help progress business goals.

Consider how you present findings—theoretical research, long descriptions, and vague summaries simply won’t stick. If your user research tool includes automated reporting, use it. Share bitesized insights and key takeaways with stakeholders, then offer up a more in-depth report.

Make sure to include:

Ultimately, focus on sharing the benefits of investing in user research and you’ll have stakeholder buy-in in no time.

Finally, let’s walk through how you can facilitate quick, actionable user insights by using a platform like Maze.

With a range of moderated and unmoderated methods from interviews to card sorting and surveys, Maze can easily turn questions into data, data into answers, and answers into shareable reports.

Plus, Maze comes with recruitment and participant management, mobile testing, and multiple templates for quick and easy research.

Here are the top three templates that PMs can use to streamline user research.

Maze’s product feedback survey is a quick and easy way to learn what users really think about your product early in the development process. It’s comprised of multiple choice, rating scale, and mixed-survey questions like:

This makes the product survey perfect for PMs who need a mix of quantitative and qualitative data to better understand product success as a whole.

If you want your product’s website design optimized for user experience, Maze’s web design preference template is a great place to start. PMs can gather insights on different website variants through 5-second tests, multiple choice, and open-ended questions.

You’ll quickly learn if users like your aesthetic choices and if they can intuitively understand your page’s purpose.

Maze’s feature usability testing template helps you capture feedback on both new and existing product features. It uses a mix of open questions, prototype tests, and an opinion scale to gauge how functional your product features really are.

It’s a quick and easy way to get rich, qualitative insights on functionality. You can then use these insights to fuel customer-centric design and product decisions.

As users change, so does the market as a whole. Just because a product is successful now doesn’t mean users won’t develop new needs in the future. As such, insight-driven product management should be the norm.

Small, rapid, and constant user feedback loops help product managers keep up with the shifting market and ensure each product decision is rooted in user data. It starts with building a user-centric culture, and ends with insights that help you deliver product success.