User interviews changed my life and career
Have you ever thought of the motivational power of the user interviews? Here is my story.
I first met the Miro team in late 2017 (it was RealtimeBoard back then). We did an exciting, challenging and productive HR sprint — working together on company values definition, people processes audit and mapping, and employee engagement initiatives. We used a product design framework for that.
I was an external consultant and we ran all the workshops live — no online whiteboards at first, just old-school flipcharts, markers, paper sticky notes (tons of sticky notes actually!). We’ve done affinity mapping exercises, brainstorming, process mapping, something similar to CJM for candidates experience, mindmapping and so on.
At some point, Slava from R&D team approached me with an unexpected request: “Would you be open to participating in a user interview?”
“What kind of?” — I was intrigued. I’ve never done a real user-interview before, neither was I interviewed as a user.
“I see you use many mindmaps and my team is working on a new RealtimeBoard feature — interactive mindmap templates. Would you share your experience of drawing mindmaps, online and offline?”
I was thrilled to participate! It took maybe about 15–20 minutes, I showed my old mindmaps, mindmapping apps I used, photos of hand-drawn mindmaps, tried to draw a mindmap using RealtimeBoard basic functionality (with stickies and lines). Slava asked insightful questions and in the end followed up my comments with a summary of 10–15 key observations and preferences.
I felt so useful in these 20 minutes. I felt even more useful, proud, rewarded and excited in several months when the Miro mindmap feature was released! As you probably guessed already, participation in that user interview actually was one of the key factors why I accepted a job offer by Miro.
Together with many other things, I was stroke by passion, curiosity, empathy and a deep interest in the user's need. I thought: if that’s the way they design their product (which is super useful indeed, especially if you run workshops, plan and map processes, brainstorm ideas for yourself or in a group, design something together) — I want to be a part of it. It’s the attitude, not the perks that make the company a great workplace. Slava showed me a real-life example of Miro values the company lived by.
One and a half years later, I started to run user interviews myself. No, I didn’t switch my People career to Product Management, but we started to use Design Thinking methodology for designing and implementing People Operations processes and new Employee Engagement initiatives.
The moment I sit together with a Miro employee and start a user interview with them I feel the most useful again. I love finding real insights, listening to the pains and ideas of our employees, so we can co-create with them those systems, processes, events, programs that they really like. Probably, the worst thing that can happen in a People Operations / HR team is to get so siloed or up in the clouds so their initiatives don’t bring any real value to the employees and meet resistance when implemented.
User interviews help to set us on the right path.
As a people programs designer, I research, prototype, test and prepare the iterative roll-outs of diverse People initiatives — training, employee recognition programs, internal comms improvements, corporate events, office culture initiatives, employee engagement programs and more. I learn from our product designers and product managers how to use their frameworks in the People Team context.
As a Miro team member, I use our product every day and sometimes get to participate in more interviews, especially during our internal hackathons. Just now I noticed that it’s probably the most inspiring part of my job: to be able to contribute to the development of our product, even though it’s not the main part of my everyday tasks.
There are many motivation theories, articles and books out there but none of them made it so crystal clear to me what motivates me the most. And that one simple user interview did. It’s even funnier that in its essence an interview is simply asking questions, listening and emphasizing with people.
That simple, that difficult. Well, probably it’s the essence of any people manager’s job, isn’t it? :)
