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March 28 - May 7, 2022
they should help you identify what type of customer you were talking to.
The goal of the quick-facts section is to help you understand how the stories you heard in this interview may be similar to or different from those you heard from other customers.
The photo and the memorable quote will act as keys that help you to unlock your memory of the stories you heard. The quick facts help you situate those stories in the right context. Now you want to capture the heart of what you learned. You’ll do this by identifying the insights and opportunities that you heard in the interview.
represent opportunities as needs and not solutions. If the participant requests a specific feature or solution, ask about why they need that, and capture the opportunity
“If you had that feature, what would that do for you?”
“What would that do for you?”
Opportunities don’t need to be exact quotes, but you should frame them using your customer’s words. This will help ensure that you are capturing the opportunity from your customer’s perspective
Throughout the interview, you might hear interesting insights that don’t represent needs, pain points, or desires.
Capture these insights on your interview snapshot. Over time, insights often turn into opportunities.
Be as thorough as possible. You’ll be surprised how often an opportunity that seems unique to one customer becomes a common pattern heard in several interviews.
The experience map that you created in Chapter 4 will help guide each interview. As you collect each customer’s unique story, you’ll want to actively listen for how their story is similar to or different from your generalized experience map.
One of the most important elements to capture on the interview snapshot is an experience map that captures each participant’s unique story.
in a way that will make our research referenceable and actionable in the future.
Drawing the underlying structure of the stories that you hear—and, by that, I mean the nodes and the links that make up the story—will help you remember the story. It will help you better understand the story.
will help you find patterns across seemingly unique stories,
drawing helps your team align around a shared understanding. Taking the time to capture visually what you learned from each interview will help you stay aligned as you learn more about your customers.
Weekly interviewing is foundational to a strong discovery practice. Interviewing helps us explore an ever-evolving opportunity space. Customer needs change. New products disrupt markets. Competitors change the landscape. As our products and services evolve, new needs, pain points, and desires arise. A digital product is never done, and the opportunity space is never finite or complete.
We don’t want to think about interviewing as a step in a linear process. Instead, our goal is to interview continuously.
“We recently had to pivot from one opportunity to another when we learned that the need we were exploring wasn’t that important to our customers. Fortunately, because we were continuously interviewing, we didn’t have to start from scratch. We could revisit our opportunity solution tree, choose a new opportunity, and start learning about it in our next set of interviews. We killed an opportunity on Tuesday, chose a new one on Wednesday, and used our already-scheduled interviews on Thursday to learn about the new opportunity.”
To nurture your interviewing habit, interview at least one customer every week.
Automate the Recruiting Process
In order to make continuous interviewing sustainable, we need to automate the recruiting process. Your goal is to wake up Monday morning with a weekly interview scheduled without you having to do anything.
The most common and easiest way to find interview participants is to recruit them while they are using your product or service. You can integrate a single question into the flow of your product: “Do you have 20 minutes to talk with us about your experience in exchange for $20?”
If you don’t have a high-traffic service,
ask the visitor to schedule an interview.
For new products or services with few or no customers, you can still implement this strategy.
you can use ads to drive traffic to a landing page. You can recruit people directly from the landing page.
Ask Your Customer-Facing Colleagu...
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sales teams, account managers, customer-success teams, and customer-support teams.
work with these teams to help you recruit interview participants.
Start by asking for five minutes at the end of a call.
define triggers to help your customer-facing colleagues identify who to reach out to.
If a customer calls to cancel their subscription, schedule an interview. If a customer has a question about feature x, schedule an interview. If a customer requests a customization, schedule an interview.
Triggers can change week ...
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communicate to your customer-facing team who you would like to interview and to make it easy for them to schedule the inter...
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“I’d love for you to share your feedback with our product team. Can we schedule 20 minutes ...
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If your customers are particularly hard to reach
or if you have a small market
We dramatically underestimate how much our customers want to help. If you are solving a real need and your product plays an important role in your customers’
However, there are some audiences that are extremely hard to reach. In these instances, setting up a customer-advisory board will help.
use your customer-advisory board as interview participants.
Offer an ongoing incentive as a reward for their participation.
One advantage of interviewing the same customers month over month is that you get to learn about their context in-depth and see how it changes over time.
pair this recruiting method with one or two of the other methods
Interview Together, Act Together
Product trios should interview together.
our goal as a product trio is to collaborate in a way that leverages everyone’s expertise. If one person is the “voice of the customer,” that role will trump every other role.
The goal is for all team members to be the voice of the customer.
A product manager will hear things that an engineer might not pick up on, and vice versa.
Each perspective is valid and can lead to an important product improvement. The more diversity in the room, the more value you’ll get from each interview.
