How to create a product your customer loves 2/3: Customer Interviews

Do you want to know what your customers really want? Then you need to get out of the building and talk to them.

Step 2 of finding your customer’s true needs, is doing interviews. If you missed Step 1, the Jobs-to-be-Done Framework, you can read about it here.

Interviews allow you to go in-depth to get to know your customer. The interviews have two goals: validating your framework and uncovering customer desires. That’s the theory. How hard could it be? Oh, boy, you have no idea.

Without any preparation, these interviews are tough. You get lost in the details. You focus too much on one part and forget another. You lose track of the overarching goal.

After quite a bit of suboptimal interviews, we created a script to guide us through. Our template provides a list of topics you want to get answered. Each topic also has some standard questions you can ask.

The first part goes over the context to validate the Job Framework. The second focuses the desired outcomes from the interviewee.

Validate the Job-to-be-Done Framework

You will go over the job in a similar way that you developed your JTBD framework internally. You ask what she did pre-execution, as execution and post-execution. Later you can map her statements to the Job Map and compare with your internal framework.

Here are a couple of good tips:

• Ask for goals, not for actions. Like in the internal steps, you need a ‘trying to get done’ point of view.
• Focus on the job map. You’re not looking for outcomes yet, that’s the second step.
• Write mentioned outcomes down. Even if you’re not yet looking for these, it is still information that you are looking for.
• Come prepared. You should know the job map well so you can follow her story and ask follow-up questions.

The personal Job Map of the interviewee will also be the framework for the questions on the next page.

Uncovering desired outcomes

The second part is the part you care about most. Here you will find, qualitatively, how customers choose a product. Make sure to dive deep into details so you can get all metrics customers use. It’s not yet about how much they care, and how happy they are. Now it’s all about writing them all down. The template can guide you through some ways to get the metrics by providing questions to ask.

Here are our experiences from this part:

• Negative experiences are easier to retrieve than positive. People remember their frustrations much better than when it all went smoothly.
• Alternatives give you direct metrics. When you ask people to compare two products, they can tell you why they like one more than the other. These comparisons provide you direct metrics to use later.
• Avoid getting feature requests. You don’t do this interview to find the best solution. You do the interview to uncover desired outcomes. If people do start suggesting features, turn it around. Ask why they would like that feature. What would it improve?
• Emotional and social outcomes are hard to find. Asking “How do you feel?” gives you a meagre response, especially with men. But asking for specific emotions are often leading questions that influence the interviewee.

The interviewee will never present you a nice list of metrics. Your job as interviewer is to see beyond what she said and extract the desired outcomes. Don’t present the outcomes to the interviewee. The fixed structure is awkward and confusing. You should create your notes well and restructure the outcomes later.

I want to reiterate that we’re not assessing satisfaction or importance. That’s what the survey is for. The goal of the interviews is to end up with a complete list of desired outcomes.

What are your experiences with customer interviews?

The next blogpost will give tips and tricks for the survey and how to analyse the data. We have a surprise to make your life easier.

Download our templates here: www.0smosis.com/templates

Want to learn the full innovation process of 0smosis? Join us on the 7th of March in the CoFoundry. There we will present our end-to-end solution to innovation. You will learn how to build a start-up in 6 weeks. Decide fast because tickets are almost sold out!

More information and tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/how-to-build-your-startup-in-6-weeks-tickets-42781354182

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