December 9

Customer Interviews – Structuring, Sharing & Asking the Right Questions

What they really think about you: How to structure and conduct customer interviews. To conduct an interview of value, it’s imperative that you prepare accordingly. Tien Anh Nguyen reminds us that you need to know the types of questions you’ll be asking, how to validate the interviewee and how to structure your time.

Turning info into insights with the Customer Interview Pyramid. Once you have completed the interview, how do you effectively communicate the findings to your team and higher-ups? At Atlassian, Sherif Mansour uses a framework that structures the process of observing what the interviewee is saying, interpreting the problems that they are suffering and, ultimately, connecting these with opportunities for the business.

Customer Development/Problem Interviewing. Customer development is a numbers game — the more people you speak with, the clearer it is to identify trends and insights. For her startup, Julia Lazaro performed more than 60 interviews and has valuable techniques to share on how to conduct them.

Why you are asking the wrong customer interview questions. Teresa Torres has found that people are often very quick to share what their priority is when choosing to buy something. But, on further questioning, it’s revealed that there are other priorities that are actually more important to them. So when conducting customer interviews we must pose questions carefully so as not to be fooled by a person’s own deceptions of themselves.

Paul McAvinchey

About the author

For over 20 years, Paul has been building and collaborating on digital products with fast-growing startups and global brands, including AOL and WMS Gaming. Currently, he's a co-founder of Product Collective, a worldwide community of product people. Members collaborate on in the exclusive Member Hub, meet at INDUSTRY: The Product Conference, listen to Rocketship.fm, learn at Product Interviews and get a weekly newsletters that includes best practices in product management. In recent years he led business development at DXY, a leading product design firm in the Midwest, and product innovation at MedCity Media, a publishing startup acquired by Breaking Media in 2015.


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