Product Collective - 👫 Interviewing your customers

How to run effective customer interviews

You probably already know that it’s important for Product Managers to talk to their customers regularly. But it’s not sufficient to just strike up conversations with your customers about the weather or their thoughts on the last season of Game of Thrones. You need to structure your discussions so that you get the most useful information from the interaction. Here’s a collection of suggestions on how to facilitate your customer interviews and what questions to ask to come away from discussions with your customers that you can use.

Ask Teresa: What are the best customer interview questions? We’re all susceptible to bias, both describing our own behavior and gathering insights from the customer interviews we conduct. Story-based interviewing helps you to overcome some of that bias by prompting your customers to share a specific example of a past behavior rather than a generalized explanation of what they think they do. This approach also helps limit your bias by focusing on the customer’s context. Teresa Torres describes the right questions to ask to put the spotlight on your customers and their experiences.
(via @ttorres)

How to use the customer interview pyramid. Customer comments are essential to delivering a quality product as a Product Manager. When collecting data, it's crucial to balance quantitative feedback that provides numerical insights with qualitative feedback. Customer interviews are an excellent way of collecting customer feedback to help your team solve problems as they arise. Josh Fechter explains how to use the customer interview pyramid to collect comments and link opportunities to issues and offer solutions.
(via @prodmanagerhq)

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5 Facilitation mistakes to avoid during user interviews. Not all interviews qualify as research interviews. While journalistic interviews may have some similarities with user interviews, research interviews focus on objectively gathering information about user needs, expectations, and interactions with a product or class of products. User interviews require a lot of attention to detail, and can fail for several reasons, but if you focus on avoiding these common mistakes that Therese Fessenden talks and writes about, you can ensure that your gathered data is objective, unbiased, and methodologically sound.
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How to interview customers. It’s hard to think of any other type of data that can produce as much value per effort as a customer interview. Customer interviews bring value on every stage of your startup journey from ideation through launch all the way to enterprise-scale. In this guide, the team at Wizen Guides cover customer interviews at each stage of your startup journey.
(via @WizenGuides)

How to Conduct Customer Interviews That Deliver Valuable Insights. Bias is a natural part of being human. We’re constantly making assumptions about how things are and how things should be. But just because you’re an expert in your field doesn’t mean you know exactly what your customers are thinking. The only way to know is to conduct customer interviews. When you have real, transparent conversations with the people who keep your business afloat, you’ll learn things you never could have known on your own. Amanda Gaid gives you the Customer Interviews 101 crash course: what they are, how they benefit you, a seven-step process for conducting them, and top FAQs.
(via @OberloApp)

AI-Driven Guided Insights

More than ever, product people aim to use data to help inform decision making in nearly everything that they do. One growing source of data to help inform our decision making is coming from robots — at least, in a way! Artificial Intelligence is driving many of the insights that are being used by Product Managers today. In this discussion, we'll dig in on how this is happening, and what changes we can expect to see in the future.

This webinar is sponsored by our friends at insightsoftware.

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