Step 1 — Field Research

Blog 3/10

Charlie Tomlinson
Agile in Learning
3 min readJun 17, 2019

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After agreeing our ‘How Might We’ statement — ‘How might we help employees develop a fulfilling career?’ — this week we’ve been interviewing employees to gather insight on what people love about their career and also what they don’t like.

The next challenge was deciding who to interview. As you can imagine with 26,000 employees, there was a lot of choice! With guidance from our coaches at Treehouse Innovation, we created a list of 50 employees who were identified as ‘extreme users’. An extreme user's behaviour places them at the far ends of a particular scale. Many will have adapted or found a way to work around the problem you're exploring. Working with extreme users allows us to push innovation rather than stay within the comfort of the generic. Some examples of our extreme user groups were…

  • Employees at tenure points associated with higher attrition
  • Employees who’ve been at the company less than one year vs. employees who’ve been here 20 years or more
  • Employees in high attrition business areas vs. low attrition areas

To get a really honest picture we included people who’ve left the company, and those who were due to be leaving over the next few months.

Treehouse recommended interviewing 25 people. You might think this seems like a small number, but the interviews are in-depth and last 90 minutes. Luckily for us, out of our list of 50, just over 25 people agreed to have a conversation. Here are five tips we were given before starting:

  1. Plan a few questions, but allow the conversation to flow off-topic and ask open WHY, WHAT, and HOW questions to dig deeper, even if you’re sure you know the answer
  2. Interview in pairs so one person can lead the conversation while the other takes notes
  3. Assume a ‘beginner’s mindset’ — Observe with exaggerated, but authentic curiosity
  4. Don’t just ask questions, make it interactive to inspire new thinking by evoking memorable experiences, see the picture cards we used below
  5. Highlight anything surprising; sources of joy and pain; any clues to what the interviewee cares about and examples of where they’re adapting or ‘going around’ existing systems or obstacles in their environment

After each interview, we uploaded the interview findings to Sprintbase — an online platform designed to guide teams step-by-step through the design thinking process.

The interviews were great fun for everyone, including the interviewees, but doing 25 interviews in one week was full on! Next week, we’ll take time to analyse the data gathered and start forming insights to focus our challenge and pinpoint the exact problems needing to be solved.

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