I mentioned that you could do a quick test of your product by asking your users to describe it to you.  There’s a related but different test of your product that you should do.  Get the senior leaders of your application to describe, in a sentence or two, why people buy your product today.  Make sure they focus on the version of the application that your users are using today, not the version that they’re working on.

Doing this by itself will tell you what your team thinks your app does and why people buy it.  You’ll learn a lot if their answers are similar or disparate.  If their answers are similar,  then you’ve got a great starting point for making design decisions.  If their answers are disparate, then a useful exercise is to understand what the points of commonality are and where the points of disagreement are, and then try to determine how to bring the team into alignment.

If you do this in conjunction with asking the same question of your users, then you can compare the answers of the two groups and make sure that they’re aligned.  If they’re not aligned, then you’ve got the opportunity to help your team better understand what your users actually do, or want to do, with your application.  If they are aligned, then you’re in an awesome position of being able to make an even better product in the future.

This is a very small piece of research that you can conduct, often just in hallway conversations, and is very illuminating.  If I’m working on a product that I’m not familiar with, or with a new team, I’ll often start here to understand the landscape.  It’s quick, it’s easy, and can form the basis of future research efforts.