Product Development Processes: Why Customer Interview is Crucial for Product Success

As a Product Manager, you don't just build great products from good ideas. You create solutions to specific problems that your customer encounters in their journey to achieving their goals.

To be able to create this solution, you need to understand their journey, goals and problems.

The best way to understand them is through customer interviews.

"Good innovators and designers deeply understand their customers. They spend tremendous energy developing that intuition. They study and understand many anecdotes rather than only the averages they find on surveys. A remarkable customer journey starts with heart, intuition, curiosity, plays, guts, and taste. You won't find any of these in a survey". - Jeff Bezos.

“The most important single thing is to focus obsessively on the customer. Our goal is to be earth’s most customer-centric company.” - Jeff Bezos

As a Product Manager, you are the voice of the customer within the company.

Customer Interviews

The first rule of excellent product management is to do customer interviews early and often.

What is a customer interview?

Customer interview is doing interviews with your customers.

Where do you find people for interviews?

Especially if you don't have existing customers.

If you have an idea of some sort, the easiest thing to do may be to interview your friends or family members. Don't do this. Unless your idea or the product you hope to build is for them.

To find people for interviews, don't think in terms of "idea to product". Think in terms of "problem to solution". You can now begin to provide answers to the following questions:

1. Who has the problem?

2. Where are they? Both physical location and where they are in the journey to solving this problem.

3. What else can I learn about them before the interview?

As soon as you provide answers to these questions, you can schedule and have your actual interview.

You need a way to document the interview. However, you will have to use your memory and write after the interview. It means you need to be a great listener. If you want to record the interview, you need permission. For most people, the fact that they're being recorded may not allow them to express themselves very well. And writing may distract you during the interview.

DON'T ASK LEADING QUESTIONS

On the 14th of March, 1992 we saw you in a yellow shirt. Did you or did you not go to the grocery store that day?

As awful as this sounds, many people ask questions like this during a customer interview.

Rather, ask open-ended questions. Questions whose answers are not yes or no.

Ask questions about their general processes or activities in the course of their work or whatever day-to-day activities depending on the kind of product you have in mind.

Examples of Questions to ask During a Customer Interview:

• What do you do when a customer comes into your business place?
• What happens between when someone finds out about your service/product through a friend, advert or referral and when they get served?
• What happens after you get back from work most weekdays?

Ask questions that reveal the process they currently use to solve the problem your product will solve.

More Examples:

• How does the customer pay you?
• What do you use to receive feedback from the customer after their service?
• What challenges do you face when you try to do such and such activities?

For each question, ask why a few times.

Have you noticed that we haven't talked about our product or idea yet? It's deliberate. At a later stage of product development, when a prototype or product is built, you can show them the product and have them use it after asking open-ended questions about their problems. For now, keep it.

Get comfortable with the fact that great products solve problems. Yes, even social media and game apps solve problems.

After your interview, you want to document and analyze the results.

Your analysis should be based on two things:

• Your objective for the interview and;
• Your hypotheses about your product, idea, and feature you want to build.

When conducting customer interviews, go with a member of the design and development teams so they can hear from a customer directly instead of relying on the product manager's notes.

When you follow the steps I explained here and practice, you will be able to do very good customer interviews.