Customer Conversations
Whether having an impromptu conversation, or doing a formal customer interview, asking the right kind of question can reveal some powerful insights on what will instantly and effortlessly compel your customers.
Good customer interviews are an important part of getting a deep understanding of customers and their needs. Now it is typical that most of the interview time is centered around things that relate to our specific industry, company, or the product that we are building for the customer. This equips us to understand their needs, pain points and priorities in this specific context.
But if we bound the scope of the interview to only the above items, we have lost a great opportunity to understand what truly matters to the customer, and the things that compel and demotivate them.
As a part of Aspirational Product Design (APD), we start by expanding our customer understanding to include their broader priorities, aspirations, and what emotionally compels and demotivates them.
Before you tune me out because I mentioned something squishy like emotions… there is an important point to make here. People make decisions emotionally, and later use data to rationalize those decision to themselves and to others. We want to build product that emotionally compels customers in ways that are instant, obvious and effortless. And later is easy to justify to themselves and others. To do that, we must first understand what truly compels them emotionally.
Before I provide some useful questions, here are a few considerations when doing customer interviews:
These questions are meant to be open-ended and not related to your specific company or product. Let the interviewee know this by saying, “Please forget that I am from XYZ. I want these questions and your answers to be 100% focused on you and your priorities, not my company.”
Ask these questions first, then later get into your company and product specific questions. This way we avoid bounding their thinking during this part of the interview.
Start with easy to answer questions so the interviewee can settle into the session. Start with questions like, “What is your title?”, “what are you responsible for?”. Your questions can progressively get deeper and more thought provoking from there.
Dedicate a few minutes to things that are Top-of-Mind (ToM) for them. What are their ToM frustrations, uncertainties and important needs? These are gold! If you can directly connect your product, functionality and/or messaging to these, they will instantly see it as relevant and important to them. It’s a great situation when your customer immediately recognizes the relevant value of your product, rather than you having to later convince them of it.
Note that this line of questioning will really help you to understand who your customers truly are. The more of these conversations you have, the stronger your intuition will be on what will resonate with customers. But realize that you will not be able to leverage everything you learn into specific product requirements or functionality. If you learn 5 new and important things about your customer, you may only be able to explicitly turn 1 (maybe 2) of those into aspirational product requirements. That is ok and still very powerful.
Here are some example questions that I will typically ask. You may want to use this list more like prompts in a conversation, vs a specific set of questions that must be answered.
Sample Questions…
What is the best part of your job?
What is the worst part of your job?
Without thinking too deeply about it, just answer with the first thing that comes to mind (this gets to ToM):
What are the most frustrating parts of your job?
What are the most important things you must accomplish?
What are things that are out of your control that prevent you from getting important things done?
What are some important deliverables that you must provide to others? What are things that make that difficult? What do you enjoy about producing these deliverables?
Please describe a great day in the job that you remember. Why did it feel great?
Can you describe a particularly bad day in the job that you can remember? Why did it feel bad?
What originally compelled you to get into this career path?
How would you like your career to unfold from here? What are some of the things required to make this happen? What are potential barriers to this happening?
What uncertainties prevent you from getting things done or making timely and decisive decisions?
How would you like others to describe you and the job you do? Which of these descriptions are most important to you?
I find it useful to have 5 - 10 conversations with people in the same role. It’s at this number that common and important points are raised by multiple people. This is when I start to feel very confident in my finding.
Once we have had a suitable number of interviews, we can make some initial passes at creating an actionable description of our customer. I plan to discuss this more in another blog post. But at a high-level, what is their Desired Self Image? What are their ToM frustrations and important needs? Identifying these will be hugely valuable to your product design, positioning and messaging.
The value of these questions goes beyond specific customer research projects. Any opportunity you have to chat with customers is a great time to ask a couple of these questions. They typically lead to some very thoughtful conversations, and demonstrates your interest and empathy in them as people.
Besides you, who else on your team should have these types of customer conversations?
