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Customer Interviews

This Keystone Habit Will Fuel the Rest of Your Continuous Discovery Habits

This Keystone Habit Will Fuel the Rest of Your Continuous Discovery Habits

I love working as a discovery coach. I work with dozens of teams at several companies spanning many industries. I coach each team—a product manager, a design lead, and a tech lead—for three months, working with them virtually week over week. During that time, we focus on developing

The Ladder of Evidence: Get More Value From Your Customer Interviews and Product Experiments

The Ladder of Evidence: Get More Value From Your Customer Interviews and Product Experiments

One of the best signs of an effective product team is a regular cadence of customer interviews and product experiments. But it’s not enough to simply check the box on these activities; we need to make sure that we do them effectively. Without a strong background in research methods,

Why You Are Asking the Wrong Customer Interview Questions

Why You Are Asking the Wrong Customer Interview Questions

I recently asked a woman what factors she considered when buying a new pair of jeans. She didn’t hesitate in her answer. She said, “Fit is my number one factor." That seems reasonable. It’s hard to find a pair of jeans that fit well. I then asked

How to Take Notes During Customer Research Interviews

How to Take Notes During Customer Research Interviews

For those of you following along, I’ve been conducting interviews to understand the life of a product manager. If you need to catch up, you can see my initial call for participants here and my breakdown of how I am selecting participants here. I’ll be blogging about both

Why You Are Probably Interviewing the Wrong People (And How to Fix It)

Why You Are Probably Interviewing the Wrong People (And How to Fix It)

Last Wednesday I put out this call to product managers to participate in a research study about the life of a product manager. I am overwhelmed by the response. In the first 48 hours, I have 90 responses. I was initially thinking that I would interview 9–12 people. But

Ask About the Past Rather Than the Future

At SXSW this year, I met a startup founder, a former fitness trainer, who was about to launch an online business offering personalized gym workouts. I liked that he had first-hand experience as a personal trainer and wasn’t just a gym rat. But I was surprised when he struggled

How To Develop Your Active Listening Skills

Have you ever found yourself disagreeing with someone about what was said? Perhaps you and one of your coworkers watched a user interview and you walked away with two different interpretations. Why does this happen? We’ve already been introduced to the ladder of inference when we discussed finding common

5 Steps For How To Develop Empathy

Empathy made my list of Top 7 Traits of a Good Product Manager. So let's take a look at what it is and how to develop it. As we learned in that article, empathy is the ability to feel another person's feelings. It is often confused

Ignore the Competition, Talk to Your Customers Instead

I love this post, Do You Care More About the Customers or the Competition?, by David Meerman Scott on Web Ink Now. Take a minute. Go read it. Everywhere I've worked, people on my team have been obsessed with the competition. Every day they read about who is

How To Talk To Your Customers (Despite Henry Ford and Steve Jobs)

"If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse." - Henry Ford (supposedly) "It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it