Quick Tips - Tips from the practice masters...

At a recent PSN Roundtable, Medrad's Product Planner Julie Gulick and Project Manager Marc Mabie discussed how they conduct interviews with customers looking into their needs and problems. Here are some of the tips they suggest concerning which questions to avoid, what questions to ask, how to ask them, and how to interpret the answers.

• Especially in the earlier stages of the product development cycle, you're not out to ask the customer "Do you want a blue button or a red button?"  Save that for later.  Instead, you're there to find out: What problems do you have?
• A few basic questions and probes to get at those problems: 
• What challenges do you have?
• What keeps you up at night?
• Describe your typical day
• Tell me about things you like and dislike about your job
• How do you interact with our product?
• If I gave you a magic wand, what would you change?
• When you ask the customer what keeps them up at night, they usually list three or four things.  Take notes.  Then go back and ask for specific examples of when each happened.  Ask them to talk about themselves and their own experience, not about somebody else's.
• Play Dumb.  Don't change their words or rephrase their answer.  Ask "Why is that particular feature or characteristic important to you?  And then follow them wherever they take you.  Remember, there are no right or wrong answers in field interviews.
• Ask them about the problems they experience in ways that encourage them to describe it in rich detail.  Your goal is to define what the issue is, not to solve their problem.  Solving the problem is a task for your engineers, not for you.  That's another reason to leave your sales people out of the interview; if you have your sales people along with you, they'll try to fix those problems themselves.
• Always emphasize open-ended questions; closed-ended yes/no questions are not useful. 
• When you're interviewing, try to drill down through what the customer can talk about easily to what they may have a difficulty verbalizing - things they're not actively thinking about.  Ask ‘why?'
• Ask for both positive and negative feedback about a product.  But don't necessarily ask for them back-to-back or become too regimented about how you approach it.  Follow whichever direction the interviewee is willing to take you.
• With a new-to-the-world product, lots of blue sky questions need to be answered.  But if you're just working on a product upgrade, you can make your questions more targeted.
• Be careful when the customer says, "I've got a great product idea for you!" Intellectual property issues when a customer is trying to tell you product ideas - your goal is not to find out a product idea, it is to discover customer issues."
• Sales people typically bring back a list of customer wants rather than needs.  Turn it around by using interview techniques to ask the sales person: "Why is that important to your customer?  What need does that solve for your customer?"

Look for more Quick Tips in this series:

Part II - Why and with whom to do field interviews

Part III - Planning field interviews

To read our latest articles in Inside Product Strategy™ click here.

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To read our latest articles in Inside Product Strategy™ click here.