What I learned building software for teenagers

A few months ago I left my role as a product manager at Hudl. Hudl makes software for sports teams to help them analyze and distribute video. While there I was primarily focused on building tools to help high school athletes get noticed — from recording their combine event scores to creating highlight videos.

As the product manager, I was responsible for deeply understanding our user’s motivations, pain points, and expectations and translating this into actionable insights. What I soon realized though was that our core users, teenagers aged 14–18, were vastly different than myself or any other user demographic I’ve interacted with in past roles.

As such, we needed to modify our best practices quite a bit to develop the feedback and learnings we needed. These learnings can likely be applied to most user segments, but I’ve found them to be especially true among teens.

Observing > Asking

When gathering feedback from users I relied on the tried and true methods — sending out surveys, emails, trying to schedule calls. But these methods were usually met with silence from teenagers who often weren’t checking their email.

I tried using live chat tools like Intercom — but for every legitimate response, there were twice as many “f*%@ you” comments.

In the end, our best approach was through observation. We found that observation helped us to learn more about what the users were doing, and trying to do than any other feedback method. Observing what our users were doing with the product, and especially what way they ‘hacked’ it to get their job done, was tremendously valuable.

To arrange these observations we would contact coaches at various schools and ask them if we could speak with individuals on their team. We also used AppSee, a tool that allowed us to record user sessions, to remotely observe the user’s taking various actions.

Actions speak louder than words. And for us, it was much easier to observe those actions than to ask our teen users to speak about what they are trying to do or talk about their experience.

Know how your product makes them look

Teenagers are acutely aware of how your product or service makes them look — both for their online presence and in real life. This is a product of growing up as a digital and social media native.

One of the interesting things we learned when observing and visiting high school athletes was that many of them did not want to create too many highlights for fear of coming across as bragging. This was something we had not expected nor considered when we were thinking about ways to encourage more users to create more content.

We also observed that sharing, especially between teammates, was usually done by passing the phone around to show a highlight clip. When our team talked about sharing we usually meant sharing the link externally, but we had not fully considered what the experience was like when you passed your phone to a friend who then had to hit play and wait for a video to buffer.

Have you built a product or service used by teenagers? I’d love to hear what you learned.