Slowly Becoming Interview Pros
4 weeks into the customer discovery process, we’ve conducted closer to 30 interviews with various stakeholders. It’s fair to say that we’ve grown so much that we no longer see interviews as a pressure, but rather a fun learning process. In the first couple of interviews, we didn’t have the clearest or most insightful questions — that was why we sometimes heard surgeons say “What do you mean by ‘physical problems’?” or “That is a really broad question.” etc. We didn’t know how to properly respond; our go-to phrase was “That’s so helpful!” for the longest time or excessively nodding at the screen after a response. Sometimes there was an awkward silence, particularly when the surgeon pivoted to a topic which we hadn’t known or researched that much about.
However, situations have gotten better and better as we keep on researching different areas of specialty, reflecting on the past interviews, and most importantly, constantly encouraging each other in the team. We have adopted a “team-blue” specific and systematic way of interviewing.
- Before an interview, we meet up as a team to do extensive background research on the surgeon’s area of expertise (e.g. gastrointestinal, pediatric, vascular and endovascular, etc).
- We then make changes to the interview sample questions that we’ve developed throughout interviews to make sure those questions tailor to different types of surgeons.
- After coming up with the questions, we go over them to make sure that they flow coherently.
- Other segments of the interview notes include opening, closure, as well as the needs portion for whatever needs that the surgeon mentions in the interview, and a note portion for an interesting discovery.
- We will separate the work by highlighting the questions we each want to ask in the interview and take notes correspondingly.
- After each interview, we synthesize our main takeaways (interesting discoveries, needs updates, etc.) and determine action items (making connections, researching new topics, etc.) in a short briefing.
The process can be however systematic and methodical, but it won’t make an insightful and significant interview if we do not ask the right questions. We as a team put in time and effort into coming up with the most logical yet creative questions to elicit ideas of surgeons that sometimes they might not even notice.
At the start of the interview, we would ask “What was the transition like from med school to residency where you have to learn about different techniques and tools?” to draw their memories back to the learning experience of the different devices. Then the next set of questions about “most difficulty in performing their specialty” and “current device limitations” comes a little more natural. Some of the surgeons have experience training surgical residents, so we will also ask them “challenges in training surgeons” in case they are skilled enough in their areas and don’t have many unmet needs themselves. Some creative questions like “If you have a magic wand to create any surgical product you want, what would you want it to be?” is to stimulate the surgeon’s imagination as well as to provide another avenue for us to learn about their unmet needs.
“If you have a magic wand to create any surgical product you want, what would you want it to be?”
Furthermore, in this discovery process, we as a team constantly review and synthesize things we learn in each interview and bring them up in another one to get different perspectives. For example, one surgeon mentioned failure in using surgical staplers, we also asked surgeons of the same specialty if they had a similar experience. Since we kept hearing the pros and cons of laparoscopic surgeries and open surgeries throughout different interviews, we tried to get opinions from surgeons who didn’t mention themselves. One surgeon also mentioned the need for better visualization and articulation in laparoscopic surgeries, we therefore tried to confirm if other surgeons shared the same need.
As we keep revising our sample questions and coming with synthesizing questions, we start to receive more positive reinforcement like “That is a really great question!” from our surgeon interviewee. At the end of this Biodesign Immersion Experience program, we will acquire multiple skills, and slowly learning how to be an interview pro will be one of them!
