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Customer Interviews

Tools of the Trade: How HiveMQ Automates Customer Interview Recruiting with Orbital

Tools of the Trade: How HiveMQ Automates Customer Interview Recruiting with Orbital

If you want to make continuous interviewing part of your discovery, you have to automate the recruiting process. It sounds simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. While many product teams want to talk to customers every week, they struggle to make this a reality. Whether they face

Ask Teresa: For Customer Interviews, Who Counts as a Customer?

Ask Teresa: For Customer Interviews, Who Counts as a Customer?

Whenever I introduce the topic of customer interviews (the foundational element of continuous discovery), I get a lot of questions about who counts as a customer. Everyone thinks their company context is unique—whether they’re B2B or B2B2C or some other combination of letters and numbers. And while yes,

Ask Teresa: What Do You Do with Atypical Customer Stories?

Ask Teresa: What Do You Do with Atypical Customer Stories?

When we interview customers, our goal is to learn as much as we can about their context. This will help us understand their specific needs, pain points, and desires (otherwise known as opportunities) which will inform our product decisions. But what happens when you hear a story that stands out

Story-Based Customer Interviews Uncover Much-Needed Context

Story-Based Customer Interviews Uncover Much-Needed Context

Customer interviews are one of the most impactful activities a product team can do. But only if we use the right methods. An early customer interviewing mistake is to spend your interview time exploring your solution ideas. You might present a prototype and ask, “What do you think?” Or even,

The Interview Snapshot: How to Synthesize and Share What You Learned from a Single Customer Interview

The Interview Snapshot: How to Synthesize and Share What You Learned from a Single Customer Interview

When you start interviewing customers every week, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by how much you are learning. When we use our customer interviews to collect specific stories about past behavior, every conversation can uncover dozens of unmet customer needs, pain points, and desires (AKA opportunities). I recommend teams

Tools of the Trade: Finding People to Interview Before You Have Customers

Tools of the Trade: Finding People to Interview Before You Have Customers

The foundation of continuous discovery is weekly touchpoints with customers. These touchpoints will allow you to collect stories that help you identify opportunities and build out your opportunity solution tree. It sounds simple, but what happens if your product is so new that you don’t have any customers yet?

Product in Practice: Making Customer Interviewing a Habit in an Early-Stage Startup

Product in Practice: Making Customer Interviewing a Habit in an Early-Stage Startup

Founders have all sorts of reasons for starting companies. Sometimes it’s because they’ve personally experienced a pain point and want to address it. Sometimes they’re dissatisfied with what’s available on the market and think they can do better. And sometimes it’s because they have an