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 and why they conduct field interviews with customers.  Here are some of the tips they offered:

• Know your development stage. You use interviewing at different times for different purposes.  In the concept development stage, you use it to identify customer needs.  You have a blank slate and you're asking: What should this be?  You are trying to figure out what problem you should be trying to solve.  In that phase, you're identifying customer needs one-on-one with customers, using shadowing & ethnography along with sit-down interviews. 
• In the planning stage, you're trying to verify missing or confusing details for a Product Requirements Document.
• The detailed design stage is about very specific questions - to do option A or option B - to start getting feedback about why one of them may be more important or more desirable.
• The test & validation stage is trying to understand what the objections to your product are going to be.  However by the time you're in this stage, your product is usually pretty well set.  You're not making that many changes, but you're putting collateral material together and starting work on those objections, to make sure the product does what the customer wants it to do.
• In production ramp-up stage, you're going back out to customers to determine what's working and what's not.
• Determine which customer segments you need to talk to.  Are they early adopters?  If so, they're the ones who are innovating, doing cutting-edge research, and are well-connected.  But if you only work with leading-edge users, you'll end up with a gold-plated product that costs too much and takes too long to get to market.  So talk to people from all segments. 
• Use your sales force to identify potential interview sites.  They know who their innovative customers are.  They know who's a chatty person, who likes to talk about their job, who's happy or not with their work.  But never invite your sales force in on the interview itself.  Either they will try to turn it into a sales call or the customer will perceive it as a sales call and they won't be as open with you.
• You don't need to interview a lot of people; 25 is plenty.  When you get to more than 20 sites with three to four people at every site, you'll have all the information you need (and this will be obvious because the input from the customers becomes redundant).  Try to include the Purchaser, the Influencer, and the User of your product among your contacts.
• The first goal in an interview is to establish credibility, bonding and rapport.  Review their environment when you arrive at the site.  Spend time observing the interviewee at work if you can. 
• People may not be able to express their product requirements, but they can express their emotions.  They get emotional about the products they work with.  Learn what's important to them emotionally.
• Everything you gather should address the question: Am I fulfilling the essential need?  Wants are going to be different from person to person, but their needs may be the same.

Look for more Quick Tips in this series:

Part I - Interview Questions 

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.