Asking the Right Questions
No matter how busy we are as product managers, we must find the time to talk to customers. We need to do this to improve our chances of building our best products. It helps us to be surer that we are using our time and resources in the best way.
Experienced product professionals realize the importance of customer interviews and try to perform them. However, the wrong questions are asked in many cases thereby reducing the benefits of these interviews. We need to be more mindful of the questions we ask to improve our chances of building something awesome.
Customers Don’t Always Tell the Whole Story
We do not mean that customers are inherently liars. No. Rather, they are prone to provide us with responses that are not well thought out. It could be argued that every human has this tendency. We are almost always ready to say something when asked a question. What we say might not capture the real picture accurately – it just sounded reasonable enough.
For instance, if we asked someone how active they are, they might tell us very active and even mention that they have a gym membership. If we probed further, we might find that they aren’t near as active as they would like to believe. The fact that many people pay for gym memberships that they do not use says a lot.
Again, if we are to ask theme park visitors what they’d like to have, chances are that a significant proportion would indicate healthier food choices. Yet, a lesser percentage would actually choose those, with most opting instead for “yummier,” inexpensive fast food options such as burgers and hotdogs.
Customers would often respond with the ideal or seemingly most logical when asked a question. They’d give a response that sounds sensible enough, even if it doesn’t tell the entire story. The truth is that we take some actions as a result of factors other than the one that seems most apparent to us.
The Brain Factor
We all like to think that we are logical entities. Sound thinking underlies the actions we take – or so we want to believe. Our brains can – and do – play a fast one on us. There is evidence to back this. The organ can make up stories that are rational or sound but which are not automatically true.
Teresa Torres does a great job of explaining this phenomenon with the aid of research by neuropsychologist Michael Gazzaniga. The study cited by the product discovery coach involved subjects with split brains. These individuals had undergone a procedure for treating severe seizures that involved cutting off the connection between the left and right hemispheres of the brain.
In a healthy human, the left hemisphere communicates with the right hemisphere to enable a variety of functions. The former controls the right side of the body while the latter regulates the left side of the body. Also, the left hemisphere controls the ability to produce language. The communication between the two brain hemispheres does not exist in split-brain patients.
When a subject’s left eye is shown a winter scene (processed by the right hemisphere), for instance, they selected shovel as a related image using their left hand (also processed by the right hemisphere). They were then asked the reason for the selection. Ordinarily, we might expect that the subject wouldn’t be able to tell why. This is considering that the left hemisphere controls language production and there’s no communication between it and the right hemisphere. No, they still provided a reason!
Torres’ post is worth checking out to read the experiment and the findings further. The study seems to support the idea that we will always have a reason to provide, even when not well grounded. Imagine the left hemisphere explaining why the right settled for a particular response or behavior despite the absence of communication between them.
Asking the Right Questions
The study referred to above shows clearly the need for us to dig deeper. We should exercise careful thoughts when interviewing customers and ensure that we are not asking questions that will not lead to great outcomes. It is important to avoid suggestive or leading questions. Care should be taken to not ask customers questions that show we have certain expectations as to responses.
This also means that we need to avoid closed-ended questions – the type that leads to a “Yes” or “No” response. We want to make our interview questions open-ended to enable us to get more quality information. Questions like “Would you buy this product?” should be avoided. And something like “How much would you pay for this?” will also be preferable to “Can you pay $X for this?”
Our aim should be to understand the customer’s behavior rather than simply settling for what they tell us. Customers will tell us what they think to be the ideal. It is left to us to unravel the actual or the reality. So, instead of simply asking customers what they normally consider when buying a product, for instance, we could ask them to describe a previous experience. Attempts should be made – using open-ended, indirect questions – to better understand what informed their decision.
Torres used the example of a woman who claimed to have purchased a pair of jeans because of fit to illustrate this. Further probing revealed other reasons actually prompted the decision. By being indirect with our questions, we avoid the risk of making customers think that we expect specific answers. It helps us avoid biased or false answers and makes our user research more valuable.
One of the ways we can also guard against biases is by asking the same questions in different ways. This allows us to confirm or disprove what was said previously. By doing this, we can improve the quality of information we get from customers drastically.
