If you teach problem interview techniques for B2B clients, this is for you

A staging post; this article is for feedback from my fellow coaches. The audience for the next version of this post is cross functional product teams who are relatively new to B2B interviews, or those who are doing it wrong:) Please share your thoughts.

A few weeks ago Franck Debane and I delivered a workshop to a giant widget company. During the problem interview section we showed a slide that contained the following advice, before teams were asked to do some interviews themselves. 

• One on one interviews are preferred to one on many or many on one. 
• Face to face interviews are preferred to phone 
• New customers are preferred to existing customers 

Then I sat in on one of the most productive 20 minute interviews I have witnessed in the last 5 years. It was a five on one (five folks interviewing one customer), phone interview with an existing customer. Go figure. 

One on one interviews are preferred to minimize “observer bias”. But in this case there was no observer bias since it was a phone interview. The trade off here was that a cross functional team was able to hear first hand from the customer on a wide range of issues, they were even able to ask a few questions. 

Face to face interviews are preferred to maximize learnings from body language. But that is an advanced technique. The riskiest assumption in this case was that the interview happpened at all. Phone interviews in this case also allowed the team to pass notes to each other and for coaches to signal to the teams “ask why!” “ask for examples!”

New customers are preferred to eliminate confirmation bias. Internal lists tend to be heavily territorial and even when teams do get access to them, the results are highly filtered to people who are telling the interviewer what they think they want to hear. Especially during problem exploration, new customers provide the highest chance at a new and honest perspective. In this case however, similar to the phone interviews the existing customers were easier to get. The team was also disciplined enough to ask the right questions and not to lead the witness. 

KEY LEARNING

Rules are made to be broken. For a group workshop, at an intermediate level the riskiest assumption is still "that the interview happens" "not that the interview is optimized". For this to happen, teams only need...

1. a modicum of confidence to start the interview
2. a handful of customers
3. trust in the process to at least ATTEMPT to listen, not mention the solution, etc...

If the interviews happen by phone instead of in person and happen with existing customers only, that's ok for the first cohort.

And since this is a safe place for fellow coaches... here's what else I am thinking

• The people who say they can't ship early or test individual assumptions usually blame it on an absolute respect for the customer. We could not possibly do any single thing to jeopardize the relationship with the customer. These tend to be the same folks who, when asked to state the problem they are solving do it from the COMPANY POINT OF VIEW, NOT THE CUSTOMER... just sayin
• The people who say they can't interview customers because it is too hard, tend to be folks with abilities to run crazy financial models.
• There's got to be a better way to productize (and scale) the funnel (yes, a solution) from segmenting (leanmentor.herokuapp.com/chat)?, to sourcing interviews, to saving and sharing the data/learnings/insights