What does it take
to talk to customers?
|
|
|
|
READING TIME
4 min & 29 sec
|
Dear es,
Together with my friends at Orbital (a company I advise), I recently ran a LinkedIn poll about user interview behaviors. My goal was to get a rough overview of how product teams approach preparing customer interactions.
Here’s what I learned from the 320 total votes:
Who schedules your customer interviews?
Most (55%) of participants schedule interviews themselves, which indicates the healthy democratization of research access to scale Discovery in companies. While it requires the right skills and tooling, I have seen many situations where enabling a product team to recruit themselves simply reduces friction. And it creates the capacity for roles like user researchers to focus on the big rocks.
How long did it take you to schedule and conduct your last five customer interviews?
But do teams get the access they need? What's the point of being able to do your research when it takes you ages to get to the next reliable insight? 53% of participants shared that setting up their last five interviews took less than two weeks. Depending on the quality of the participants (and, consequently, insights), this feels good enough. Faster is often better, but you sacrifice interviewee quality for an artificial cadence.
How do you target interview participants?
Speaking of which, How do teams ensure they talk to the right people? Product Analytics data (38%) and Screener responses (32%) are the go-to qualifiers for the participants of this poll. This is probably the result of a team's context: The former depends on the available tooling and interview infrastructure, and the latter "only" requires skills to craft revealing screener questions.
Lucky for you, Orbital can help you in these three areas.
Disclaimer: I see the scientific shortcomings of LI survey data and the potential skewing of results. It's one valuable (and, frankly, fun) data point.
HOW TO PUT THIS THEORY INTO PRACTICE
- Where can you remove dependencies? What tooling and skills does your team need to talk to five customers in the next 2 weeks?
- Can you shorten the lead time to insigt? It might not always have to be an interview. What is the next most critical piece of insight to reduce uncertainty further and what is the activity with the shortest lead time to get to it?
- Who do you NOT want to interview? If you can't name a customer segment whose problems you're deliberately deprioritizing right now, you probably get lost in averages. Be clear on your WHO.
|
Did you enjoy this one or have feedback? Do reply. It's motivating. I'm not a robot; I read and respond to every subscriber email I get (just ask around). If this newsletter isn't for you anymore, you can unsubscribe here.
Thank you for Practicing Product,
Tim
How to Dive Deeper into Product Discovery
A Practical Guide to Using OKRs in Product Management: This hands-on guide goes beyond the average "best practices" of OKR basics and instead focuses on the real challenges of Product Teams for using OKRs in addition to Product Discovery, Roadmaps, and Scrum.
|
|
Content I found Practical This Week |
Layers of Product Discovery
Gathering data from stakeholders and colleagues within your company is easier but is not enough to create the right product. Don’t stop there. In business-facing products, there is a customer at the client that acts as the business buyer of your product who is likely not the end user. Understanding data from this business buyer is incredibly important. Don’t stop there.
|
Turn It Up or Turn It Down.
“How long should discovery take?”, “When do we start and stop interviewing?”, “How many people should we talk to?”, “Hope many usability tests should we do?”, “How many prototypes should we build?”, “How many A/B tests before we decide?”, and so on. These are usually the wrong questions to ask. They’re usually wrong because they’re being asked in the context of a timeline or some kind of sequential stage-gated process. Folk want to know when they can stop doing one thing (like talking to customers) and start doing the next thing (like building some software).
|
Getting Faster to Insights with Visual User Interview Notes
|
What did you think of this week's newsletter?
As a Product Management Coach, I guide Product Teams to measure the real progress of their evidence-informed decisions.
I focus on better practices to connect the dots of Product Strategy, Product OKRs, and Product Discovery.
Enjoy the newsletter? Please forward it. It only takes 2 clicks. Coming up with this one took 2 hours. |
| 