The in-person interview might not be the easiest way to find answers for the product questions but it is definitely one of the most powerful ways to get customer insights for product design, persona building, and essentially business model innovation. As tons of articles have already explained the difference between product surveys and in-person interviews, I will save the space here to convince you that the truth always lies outside of the room. Maybe it will be a topic for another day.
The main thing to get out from a product interview is customer insights. Insight in a way is the pixel of the product blueprint. They wouldn’t make much sense until you collect enough of them so that you can see the fuller picture laying in front of you. So what exactly is customer insight? Let me try my best to describe it here: Simply put, insight is the common thinking logic of your customers. The insight tells you the reason why the customer do what they do and the reasons behind their decisions and desires. If the product is a solution to a problem, then the insight is the cause of the problem. Insight is the deepest level of information to the phenomenon on the surface. These valuable pieces of information are almost impossible to get from a survey. They will certainly come from a large amount of in-person interviews.
Though anyone could conduct an interview with the goals in mind, techniques sometimes can take you for an extra mile:
Create an environment for sparks
- Summarize along the way. Have a clear path of where you are coming and where you are going in the conversation can really help both you and the interviewee organize thoughts instead of running in circles.
- Let the customer drive the conversation. Pay attention to how customers steer you. Lead the customers to talk about what they care about; how they are like to perform the work; what’s vision how they see this work can be accomplished. When there is resistance or divergence in the direction you are driving, clarify it to the customer of what you are talking about vs where she is taking the conversation, and which one is more important. Try not to resist the direction that the customer is taking you, but to inspire the customer to get more insights. After all, you want to build a product that the customer wants. The key is not to take over and drive the conversation. In this setting, you must be a listener than a seller.
Ask the right questions
- Always ask about problems and never about solutions. It’s not the customer’s job to design solutions. Whatever the solutions that the customers give you are often biased to their own working style. Your job is to strip off the noise of the information received and find the essence of the problem that is 100% shared across your target customers. Majority of the product on the market is trying to solve problems and pains instead of providing gains. The way to identify the gain provider is easy: most of the technology enhancement products are gain providing products, which improve the performance of the current products to save money and time. A good example is a new computer chip that makes the computer run faster with lower manufacturing costs. It is very easy for the customer to start talking about the solution. The easiest way to steer the conversation back is to ask them why they think the solution is the way they are describing it.
- Always ask the reason for everything the customer is talking about. Questions like “Why?”, “ What’s it for?”, “ Can’t you just do it the other way?” and “Why not?” can often point you in the right direction. Dig deep till you find yourself running in circles. Don’t forget where you started digging so you can go back after done digging.
- Always ask about the frequency of customer’s problems. A high-frequency problem is what to go after. “Every once in a while” is something to avoid. A product for low-frequency problems is hard to create stickiness. A low-frequency problem is not worth solving unless the value is worth solving. Then you are essentially selling insurance in that case.
- Find the existing alternative solutions. Try to avoid areas where alternative solutions are strong. It is easy to get into the red ocean in a space with strong competition. A sustainable product should always try to stay in the blue ocean when possible. Therefore, it would be ideal if there is no current way of performing the work associated with a large value.
- Always ask the customer to pay. Willingness to pay is a universal gauge to measure if a problem is worth solving. And how your customers prefer to pay lays the foundation for the revenue model. A revenue model can be as simple as direct sales or can get more complicated when there are multiple customer types. Youtube, in this case, is a good example to understand: The customers of Youtube include viewers, content publishers, and advertisers. Out of the three, viewers and advertisers are paying the bill. At the end of the day, someone has to pay for the product if you are not intending to offer free labor. Figuring out how and how much your customer wants the pay is a key factor to a viable business model and a crucial clue for your product design as a solution.
- Don’t ask ice cream questions. Ice cream questions are things like: “Do you want to be rich?”, “Do you want to look good?”, or “ Do you want to be healthy?”. One of the reasons behind the ice cream questions is the craving for customers’ confirmation, which is very unnecessary. Oftentimes, rejection is followed by the most valuable suggestions and insights. The solution coming out from rejections is much more assured to be the best solution than a solution coming out from confirmation.
Other things to keep in mind
- Pay very close attention to customer reactions. In general, customers are interviewer pleasers. They are easy to be taken away by the interviewer and trying to avoid any conflict. They may say everything that you are talking about is good. It’s your job to figure out what are truths and what are lies. Benchmark the customer reaction to themselves but not between customers because each person has a different dramatic level. When the value proposition is right, you will feel the click from the customer who will show a different level of interest. If everything in an interview ends up to be equally good then chances are nothing is good that you are offering.
- Solve small problems. Big problems take incremental steps to solve. World hunger can not be solved by one solution. Try to tackle the big problems that will make you ask ice cream questions that provide no insights and end up making you fail or lost. Customers may not start with a problem at the ideal level to solve in a conversation. Start from it and work your way back to that one roadblock you can remove. The path to breaking down a big problem can be an excellent topic for a customer interview. Here is a scenario: Customer: I want to look better. Q1: What do you think is the most imperfection on your look every day? A: My hair is not straight enough. Q2: Why don’t you straighten your hair before you get out? A: It takes too much time. ←I think that is a problem viable to solve.
- Customers always understand your product. If they seem confused or disinterested, it is because your customer might not have the problem you thought. You are not going to find much resonation when selling photo editing software to a lawyer. Many may think the negative response is caused by the bad job they did on explaining the product. However, when this happens, the truth is always either the wrong customer is targeted by your solution or your product solution is flawed. The product-market fit may not exist due to incorrect value propositions in this scenario. Customers should be able to understand the product easily if the product fits their needs.
- When all the topics hit a dead end, reorganize the conversation and try to discover new opportunities by asking: 1. what task takes the most time and money. 2. What information is missing that prevents the customer improves the task outcome.