Mastering product discovery with interviews

Uncover how mastering the art of customer interviews can transform your product discovery process, leading to more customer-centric products and maximum business impact.

The Role of Customer Interviews in Product Discovery

Proper customer discovery should always incorporate interviews as a fundamental component. Teresa Torres, in her renowned book 'Continuous Discovery Habits', emphasizes the significance of 'weekly customer interviews' as a pivotal practice in the product discovery process. This approach resonates with the essence of understanding the customer's world on a deeper level. Interviews serve as the cornerstone of product discovery, allowing us to establish meaningful connections, dig further into customer insights, and truly empathize with their needs and desires.

By actively listening and understanding the details of their experiences and perspectives, we gain invaluable insights that pave the way for developing products that connect to solving genuine pain points and needs.

So, how can you make interviews a weekly part of your product practice?

Embracing Discovery Sprints for Product Discovery

Implementing the correct ceremonies for planning, running, and concluding product discovery is crucial. Until recently, discovery sprints have been rarely talked about, let alone implemented. They are however gaining popularity, and you can use them to your advantage.

The vast majority of product-teams are running delivery sprints, so establishing a regular cadence and ceremonies for discovery is relatively easy, once you have the right tools.

Discovery Sprint Planning

During sprint planning, you're essentially aligning with your team on what you'd like to learn. The team should review:

1. Your current product objectives: What product KPIs are you working towards and what high-level questions do you have about your existing/potential customers. For example - "What are our enterprise customers downgrading their subscription after 1 year"?

2. Define interview questions: What questions do you have specifically for the interview? This should be focused on understanding the users previous behaviours rather than projecting into future behaviors. For example - "How have you used the product over the past month? Tell me about your experience doing X activity"? Remember, you're trying to learn about how they are currently doing things - this surfaces the best opportunities.

3. Identify target personas: Who do you need to speak to drive your learning target? Where and how can you get access to these people? For example - "To achieve our learning goal, we need to speak to enterprise clients who have downgraded their subscription within the last 3 months".

This prep work is essential for productive discussions, to ensure you're learning the most in the least amount of time.

Product Discovery Sprint Review

During the sprint review, take the time to summarize the research and make it accessible to all product team members. By doing so, everyone remains informed and aligned, ensuring that customer insights drive product decisions. You can simply report around your key headings above to summarize the learnings:

1. Current product objective

2. Learning goal (High-level questions and interview questions)

3. Who we spoke to, how many, who conducted the interviews

4. Learnings:

   1. Key themes: What are the most relevant opportunities? For example - "40% of users downgraded because they felt they were not getting value from the deals pipeline feature".

   2. Journey map: Where did these themes occur?For example - "This problem occurred at the deals pipeline creation stage". It's best to visualize this on a customer journey to emulate your product's experience.

Embracing discovery sprints helps in maintaining a regular cadence of interviews and capitalizing on the continuous flow of customer feedback.

For more information on discovery sprint, see this fantastic article by Rafayel Mkrtchyan.)

Stakeholder Buy-in for Continuous Product Discovery

To ensure that weekly discovery sessions become a cornerstone of the product development process, it's imperative to secure buy-in from leadership, the product team, and other stakeholders such as sales. Sharing the proposed sprint process and demonstrating how it can seamlessly integrate into product operations is key to garnering support.

If there's resistance, a great way to do this initially is:

1. Propose the discovery sprints as a trial for 3 months.

2. Demonstrate the learnings your team has benefited from within the 2 months (by sharing your sprint reviews to summarize the top pain points and needs from different customer segments).

You can even estimate the cost saved from these learnings if they caused you to pivot away from a more expensive or time consuming delivery sprint. The ideal scenario is to demonstrate the adoption of the features you eventually build that were informed by discovery, but this data takes time to collect.

When stakeholders understand the value of customer interviews in shaping a successful product strategy, they are more likely to commit the necessary resources and support.

Strategies for Scheduling Consistent Customer Interviews

To enhance the efficiency of your interview scheduling process, it's essential to take a proactive approach by planning ahead. One effective strategy is to collaborate closely with customer-facing teams such as sales or customer service, as they can often identify potential interview prospects based on their interactions with customers. By leveraging their insights and expertise, you can streamline the recruitment process and ensure that you are engaging with a diverse range of customers that help you achieve your learning goal.

In addition to internal collaboration, you may also want to consider using panel tools for recruitment purposes. Platforms like Respondent and Testing Time provide a convenient way to access a pool of pre-screened candidates who match your desired criteria. These resources can save time and effort in sourcing participants for your interviews, allowing you to focus on extracting valuable insights from them.

Having a well-defined strategy in place for scheduling interviews is crucial for maintaining a consistent pipeline of customer feedback. Proactively identify and engage with potential interviewees — ensuring you have a steady stream of insights will fuel your product discovery efforts.

Leveraging Interview Insights for Product Innovation

The real power of customer interviews lies in how these insights feed into product discovery, highlighting potential opportunities within the customer's journey. As the product team synthesizes feedback from interviews, they begin to understand pain points, desires, and behaviors that are not always explicit. This deep understanding sparks innovation, guiding the team to design features and enhancements that resonate with users.

Conclusion

Mastering the art of customer interviews is pivotal in transforming your product discovery process towards customer-centricity and maximum business impact. By embracing discovery sprints, securing stakeholder commitment, and planning your interviews in advance, you can unlock a wealth of valuable customer insights that drive innovation and product success.

Continuous engagement with customers through interviews is not just a one-off event, but a continuous approach that uncovers hidden opportunities, and guides you towards building products that truly resonate with your target audience.