Customer interviews are dangerous.
Honest customers give you a lot of invaluable feedback. Because they seem so excited and enthusiastic about your product, you feel like you owe it to them to build the features they want as fast as possible.
Polite users will tell you how much they love your product, leaving you with a sense of approval and comfort but necessarily insights.
How do we talk to our customers not for the sake of doing it, but actually to get something out of it? The only way to avoid such pitfalls is to have a central question for your user interview. All other insights you gather get stored into your database, but your next action plan comes directly out of having this central question answered.
Surprisingly, customer interviews don’t begin with a question. It begins with a decision.It starts with exploring the decision to be made for your team. It might be about what features to build first, who to target, which direction to head. Only when you have this, can you formulate a hypothesis. The central question for your user interview then becomes one or two things that you need to learn first, that you know the least about, in order to inform that decision.
It’s not always about how satisfied they are with our product, or what feedback they have for our features. The essence of a core question always ties back to understanding why our customers love us, and what value they experience with us. Best way to come up with a central question is by monitoring the behaviors of your champions.
To properly prioritize, it always helps us to build a decision tree, and sort them to figure out which things we need to learn first. And filter them to pin our focus on what you know the least about.
