Customer Interviews for Product Managers

The likelihood of your product being considered a success is a function of its ability to address the customer’s pain point. Customer interviews can help you to make out what those pain points or needs are. They are useful for validating whatever product ideas or features you have in mind.

To get the full benefits, however, you must approach these interviews the right way. You need to talk to the right people and ask the right questions. Are you uncertain about how to conduct effective customer interviews? We provide some tips you can use.

Preparing for Customer Interviews

Proper planning must go toward user interviews to get the full advantage. You will need to adopt a methodical, carefully thought out process. It is vital to not carry them out impromptu. Effective customer interviews start with a hypothesis. This is a crucial first step in any form of user research or research in general. As a product manager, you should have a problem in focus that you want users to help you validate.

Working with that hypothesis, you then create questions that are effectual for validating them. These should be open-ended to enable you to get as much information as possible from the interviewees. The number and nature of questions you come up with will determine the length of the average interview. Next, you need to find people to interview. You need to speak with as many people as you can. The ideal people and the number to interview will depend to a large extent on the user segmentation you are working with.

Getting participants may be hard because you are going to be using their time. Therefore, there may be a need to provide compensation or incentive. You could make this a little higher than what they would have gotten for the time taken. It helps to ask potential participants some screening questions to be sure they are the right fit.

How to Interview Users Effectively

As we noted earlier, effective customer interviews are those that involve the right questions. These open your eyes to features worth adding to your roadmap.

Here are some ideas on how to go about them:

Find out how they do things – With a specific feature in focus for possible development, learn how users currently do what it is designed to achieve. You may ask them to demonstrate how they use existing products to meet their needs.

Question about their current experience – In addition to learning about how customers do things currently, find out what their experience has been. Get them to tell you what they like about their current solutions. Why did they buy them? The information you extract can help you identify opportunities and validate your value proposition.

Uncover more paint points – Chances are that customers aren’t fully satisfied with solutions currently available. Inquire about their needs that have yet to be satisfied. What do they wish they could do? The feedback you get can help you to better understand what is more valuable to them.

Ask why – You should ask “why” questions as often as possible to better understand the problem. These are especially useful as follow-up questions. Initial responses that users provide don’t usually paint the full picture. So probe further by asking why they responded the way they did.

Find out what difference would be made – Learn from users how a feature or solution would make their life or job easier. This is more useful in situations where you get some solution ideas while speaking with customers. A question in this direction is useful to know what benefit matters most to each one.

Ask about readiness to buy – While it might appear so, you should still ask if the consumer would be willing to buy or use a solution that addresses their yet-to-be-met needs. How much would they pay for such? Listen carefully to what they have to say. You may also ask them to describe what their typical purchase process is like.

If you have mockups or prototypes, you could present them to users for you to observe their behavior. Compare your observations to what they tell you to get a better understanding.

What to Do After Interviews

Ideally, you should allow some time between interviews. Do not rush from one to the next. Use that time to reflect on the information you got from a session you have just ended. You may use insights gained from one interview in subsequent ones. Add more questions, edit some, or remove others altogether as necessary.

When you are done with all planned user interviews, combine all notes taken and observe common patterns. Pay attention to pain points that most of the users have.

Make sure that you document your findings properly. Keep all recordings and materials in a place where they can be easily accessed whenever they are needed for making decisions. This will go a long way in helping to develop a winning solution.

You should note, however, that customer interviews cover only a part of user research. They provide you qualitative data. You’d also need quantitative metrics to improve your chances of creating a successful product.