What are your users doing right before they use your product? What about right after?

These are important questions that can help you build a better product. It’s not enough to understand the pain or problem your product solves; you also have to understand the circumstances in which it helps. What time of day is your product typically used? What triggers a customer’s move to using your product? Where are they? How much time do they have? What else is competing for their attention? What device are they on?

Context matters. It’s a critical part of understanding your customer. And it can hugely influence how you build your product.

The more you can map out your customer’s day-to-day life, including what they’re doing, how they’re doing it and with whom, the better equipped you’ll be to build a product that solves a meaningful problem at the right time. Attention is so valuable, and it’s almost impossible to capture repeatedly. Knowing how you fit into your customer’s day, so that you can interject at the right times, under the right circumstances, will build stronger behavioral loops and better outcomes for you and them.