Quick Tips - Tips from the practice masters...

At a recent PSN Member Roundtable, Medrad's Product Planner Julie Gulick and Project Manager Marc Mabie discussed how and why they conduct interviews with customers.  Here are some of the tips they offered about the planning and management of interviews examining customer needs and problems:  

• Holding conversations to arrive at a common view is extremely beneficial within your own development team because the lead person frequently assumes that since they know the questions, everybody else knows too.  But it usually turns out that everyone has a different view. 
• Convene a cross-functional team of colleagues who are curious, willing to learn, and good listeners.  Your quality control people, for example, will look at things differently than an engineer or a marketer will.  That cross-functionality will be very helpful.
• Go to your competitors' sites to find out why their customers like your competitor's product.  Do a customer satisfaction survey to look for your own customers who are unhappy, who have left your franchise and bought a competitive product.  Keep track of that competitive product and who has it. 
• Script your calls when setting up phone interviews.  Introduce yourself several times, in advance, via e-mail.  Start interviewing by calling the one interviewee you don't care if you get; stumble through the script, then hone it and start calling the rest of your contacts.  Identify yourself and your essential mission, but don't give them too much detailed information. 
• Provide your team with interview training so that everybody learns how to ask questions, how to interview, and what questions to ask. Get your in-house team to practice mock interviews on one another before going out to customers. 
• Find a quiet location for the interviewee and either one or two people from your team.  If there are two of you, trade off interviewing.  Whoever's interviewing at any given time is in control.
• Use the morning to watch, to deepen your understanding of their work environment, and to collect fodder for later questions.  Watch how they use the product.  Don't ask questions during observation because you won't be set up to capture their responses.
• Keep it confidential. Assure the interviewee that everything they say is confidential, that it won't be shared with anyone except the members of your own team when you get back to the company. 
• Tape and transcribe. Ask if they have any problem with taping so you can accurately capture their thoughts.  Then transcribe them so you can mine the interview transcripts over and over again. 
• Listen. Listen 90 percent of the time, speak 10 percent, and don't interrupt.  Silence is a great technique for getting information out.  When you get the interviewee to think for a moment, they re-live real experiences, which is how you get deeper into what you're doing.  You'll never learn anything if you're the one that's doing the talking.
• Don't ask for too much time. Ask the interviewee for half an hour.  You can always go longer.  If you ask for 45 minutes they may not sit down with you at all.  When 30 minutes passes, you say, "Oh, we've gotten to half an hour - do you have a few more minutes?"
• Show your appreciation. Bring along a token gift, like a monogrammed pen, if that's permitted in your industry.  You never know when you'll have to go back and contact that interviewee again.
• The customer is right. Don't try to convince the customer that they're wrong.  The customer is always right, even if they're way out in left field.
• Have fun.  If you're not having fun, rethink what you're doing.

Look for more Quick Tips in this series:

Part I - Interview Questions 

Part II - Why and with whom to do 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.